Argentine soybean harvest nears end, wheat planting at 7.7%: BAGE

Argentina’s soybean harvest is now complete on nearly 91% of the total planted area while wheat planting picked up pace as the total planted area more than doubled versus the previous week, the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange (BAGE) said.

For soybeans, the total harvested area reached 90.7%, up nearly six percentage points on the week with total collected volumes now standing at 52.6 million mt, well on track to hit their 56 million mt estimate for this year.

Meanwhile, wheat planting for the 2019/20 marketing year reached 7.7% of the projected 6.4 million ha, or 490,000 ha, more than doubling from 3.1% in the previous week.

A dry week in some areas aided planting and farmers were able to progress quickly with the highest gains made in the far northeast corner of the country (Noroeste) where the speed of planting was almost double the national average at 13% planted.

But just further east (Noreste) flooding caused by heavy rains two weeks ago led to transport problems and planting slowed on the previous week.

Persitant wet weather prior to last week also hampered soybean collection in some areas despite an overall nationwide gain. 

"However [despite weekly gains] the north end of Santa Fe and the Northeast Argentina region still maintained extensive areas without harvesting due to floods," BAGE said. 

Harvesting in some localised areas has been delayed with only 22% of the crop in the Northeast Argentina area harvested versus near completion in most other areas. 

In corn, projections for a total harvested volume of 48 million mt were kept stable as the total harvested area reached 37.4% of the 6 million ha planted, up a mere 1.3 points on the week.