I hope you watched Producer.com and our Twitter feeds for coverage of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s monthly supply and demand report issued Feb. 10.
It is our intention to provide the best markets coverage possible, and that commitment is made a lot easier with our website, social media and video offerings that complement the newspaper.
If you don’t already have it, I recommend downloading the Western Producer app to your smartphone. That way, you can keep up with the markets and important reports from Statistics Canada and the USDA while you go about your daily activities.
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China’s grain imports have slumped big-time
China purchased just over 20 million tonnes of wheat, corn, barley and sorghum last year, that is well below the 60 million tonnes purchased in 2021-22.
But sometimes you are simply too busy to keep up with all the daily chatter.
That’s where the weekly newspaper comes in to give you a condensed review and analysis.
We also have new video offerings on our website designed to sum up markets in an efficient manner. I review the week’s markets in separate crop and livestock reports. The videos are posted Thursday mornings and are less than 10 minutes long.
One farmer told me he likes to prop up his smartphone and watch them while he eats breakfast.
I promise, I’ll try to present the news in the most appetizing way.
And with that pitch out of the way, let’s talk about the weather.
In next week’s Markets section we intend to run a roundup of the world’s crop conditions.
The Southern Hemisphere is now harvesting, and winter crops in the Northern Hemisphere will soon come out of dormancy.
I’ll whet your appetite for next week’s weather and crop roundup with a look at China.
We haven’t heard much about how weather is affecting its winter wheat crop this year.
The reason is that conditions so far are favourable. There are no photos this year of soldiers watering wheat plants with buckets or premier Wen Jiabao spraying crops with a garden hose as there were in 2009.
The area planted to the crop is about the same as the previous year, at a little more than 55 million acres.
There was good soil moisture at seeding in October, and normal-to-above-normal autumn temperatures encouraged vigorous early growth, according to a USDA report in December.
Current vegetation index graphs show crop growth is a bit better than last year in the five provinces (Henan, Shandong, Hebei, Anhui, and Jiangsu) in the North China Plain, where 95 percent of the crop is grown.
Last year’s crop was record large, and China won’t consume it all.
Wheat stocks at the end of the current crop year are expected to climb to 63 million tonnes, which is the most since 2001-02.
As a result, wheat imports are expected to be minimal again. The USDA forecasts that China’s wheat imports will be two million tonnes this year, down from 3.3 million the previous year.
