• Expiry of the August ’14 soybean and meal contracts gave a show of fireworks to the market today as cash basis prices surged with domestic end users and exporters found themselves short for late August and early September. The meal contract has pushed up $50/ton clearly indicating the dangers that lurk within the spot month and more so in the contract delivery period – a lesson which should not be lost! Clearly soybean growers with stocks remaining are enjoying the rally as a (perhaps) last opportunity to make sales. Now that the August contract is finally “off the board” it will be interesting to see how the new crop market settles.

• Brussels granted weekly wheat export licences totalling 726,970 mt bringing the season total to 2.69 million mt. This is 119,885 mt (4.3%) behind last year. 164,000 mt of corn import licences were granted making the season total 1.8 million mt.

• US weekly export data was released as follows:

Wheat; 338,700 million mt which is below estimates of 450,000-650,000 mt.
Corn; 670,700 mt which is within estimates of 600,000-900,000 mt.
Soybeans; 1,143,200 mt which is within estimates of 850,000-1,150,000 mt.
Soybean meal; 120,100 mt which is below estimates of 300,000-625,000 mt.
Soybean oil; 2,000 mt which is within estimates of 0-30,000 mt.

• In Stratégie Grains’ latest grain report issued yesterday they estimated the EU soft wheat crop higher at 144.1 million mt, which is 3.6 million mt ahead of their July estimate and well above last season’s 135.5 million mt. Interestingly they revised their outlook for exports down by 900,000 mt to 23.7 million mt as a result of reduced exportable milling wheat availability, mainly in France. The proportion of milling wheat in the EU harvest is estimated at 59% which is a sharp reduction on the 2013 figure of 71%. As a corollary, the proportion of feed wheat is sharply up at 41% compared with 29% last year!