The 2023 northern hemisphere harvest has progressed significantly since our last update, with mixed reports on yields and quality.
Reports coming from Europe and Russia show a slightly better-than-average harvest for wheat and Winter barley, but Spring crops have been poorer in both quantity and quality due to harsher, more extreme weather during the Summer.
Crop conditions
With the Winter barley harvest now a distant memory, yields being reported give an average of around 7.5-8.5t/ha, with a mixed-quality and the barley size and weight depending on the soil type and barley variety. Despite the variable quality, almost all the grain offered from the Winter barley crop market is making the required specification.
Recent harvests have given a pattern of Winter wheat maturing earlier while Spring barley has reached maturity much later. This has been repeated this season, with the majority of Winter wheat being cut before the Spring barley was fit to consider being harvested.
The optimism around wheat has been rewarded with good quality grain in almost every case with yields also at high levels, although not as good as last year.
There had been reports at the start of the wheat harvest of some grains showing signs of sprouting disappeared, with specific weights on samples regularly coming in at 78+kg/hl, and many over 80kg/hl.
Despite mixed weather conditions in August, farmers were able to harvest much of their wheat at reasonable moisture, reducing drying costs.
There has been concern around Spring barley crops. In many cases, these fears have been realised with poor-yielding crops displaying issues around grain quality, giving malting barley buyers a lot of headaches. There has been a distinct north/south divide on the levels of nitrogen/protein being tested. Most malting intakes have been setting 1.65 as the target Nitrogen level for distilling markets but this year this base has had to rise to 1.75 or, in some cases even higher. In contrast to this Nitrogen issue, the north of Scotland has encountered problems with skinned grains. While Nitrogen levels are generally low in the north, skinned grains on all varieties, particularly the main 2 – Laureate and Diablo – have been testing concerningly high which has forced the buyers to extend their terms well beyond the 6% normally targeted.
With the odd exception, yields on the spring barleys have been reported as lower than recent years’ averages, which has probably been part of the reason for high Nitrogen in the crops.
Markets
Pressure has been on the grain markets throughout August with November wheat futures showing the results of this trading to a low of around £185 in the middle of the month. Any rallies have been short-lived which indicates that there aren’t any current concerns on crop availability from the northern hemisphere harvest.
Feed wheat in south east Scotland is finding sellers at £190 ex farm for Oct/Nov and current levels for feed barley are still only finding buyers if marketed around £145 ex farm. Export markets are showing interest, but values aren’t really any better than the domestic trade is offering just now.
Those selling into these markets are generally the farmers who lack storage or need finance and any farmer with suitable facilities is tending to consider holding onto their produce until markets improve.
I can’t finish this report without mentioning the continuing uncertainty in Ukraine and the element of surprise that could still emerge from that region, which could affect grain markets at any point, so we can’t just assume that the current state of markets is here to stay.