By Michael Hirtzer
CHICAGO, April 28 (Reuters) – U.S. wheat tumbled to its
lowest levels since June 2010 on Tuesday, pressured by stable
crop conditions and recent rains in what were dry portions of
the southern Plains.
A massive net short position held by speculative investors
also weighed on Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures <0#W:> amid
plentiful global grain supplies and cheaper offerings out of
Europe and the Black Sea region.
“The big funds want to press the market lower, and lower we
go,” said CHS Hedging research manager Joe Lardy.
Corn <0#C:> was narrowly mixed, hovering near a six-month
bottom on offsetting factors of favorable U.S. weather and
technically oversold futures.
Dry conditions forecast for roughly the next 10 days in the
Midwest was expected to allow farmers to rapidly plant corn,
limiting the potential of switching to soybean seeds, which have
a shorter growing season.
“Weather forecasters continue to forecast improving
conditions for fieldwork over most of the Midwest,” Tobin Gorey,
director of agricultural research at Commonwealth Bank of
Australia, said in a note to clients.
Soybean futures <0#S:> jumped about 1 percent to a
three-week high on expectations of minimal corn-to-soy
switching. Also, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said earlier
that exporters sold 390,000 tonnes of U.S. soybeans for shipment
to unknown destinations during the 2015/16 marketing season.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to have areas that are
drowned out of corn and put into beans,” Lardy said.
CBOT May wheat was down 4-3/4 cents at $4.65-1/2 per
bushel as of 10:55 a.m. CDT, its lowest in nearly five years
after earlier in the session knocking out previous lows from
October.
Wheat prices in Russia and Europe also eased, respectively,
on ideas that Moscow will remove a wheat export tax and
crop-friendly rains in France and Germany.
CBOT corn for May delivery was up 1-3/4 cents at
$3.62-1/4 per bushel, while May soybeans were 14-1/4 cents
higher at $9.87-1/4.
(Additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Naveen
Thukral in Singapore; Editing by Joseph Radford, Mark Heinrich
and Lisa Von Ahn)