Winter wheat prices in August were impacted by falling Canadian production, lower global stocks, and increasing pressure on European and Russian output and exports.
As it’s now the end of the month, let’s take a look at how winter wheat prices
performed in the past 30 days.
Winter wheat prices pushed higher this week on speculation that Russia will cap exports due to ongoing production challenges. Prices also found support after Statistics Canada revealed that winter wheat production is set to decline across Canada compared to last year’s output.
In the month of August, front month Chicago SRW wheat prices were 4.8% lower than where July ended, but they are still 26% higher than where we were at this time a year ago.
Similarly, front-month Kansas HRS wheat prices lost 5.3%, or 31 cents over the course of August, but 34% higher than a year ago!
For our GrainCents readers, we’re watching a variety of factors that might affect winter wheat prices: 2 are bearish, 5 are bullish, and 7 are noise.
(If you’re not familiar with what “noise” is, then we recommend you check out our GrainCents risk management process towards winter wheat prices.)
This month, GrainCents investigated winter wheat topics such as:
• A sales recommendation for winter wheat,
• A larger than expected supply of wheat in the August WASDE report,
• Why U.S. grain export prices have hit a 6-year low, and
• Canadian total wheat production, as reported by StatsCan
Looking forward, a recent FarmFutures survey pegged 2019/20 US winter wheat acres at 33.6 million. That would be a 2.6% jump or 850,000 more acres than this past year. Total winter wheat acres are expected to increase by about 4%, while white wheat intentions dipped.
If you want to be more on top this sort of action on winter wheat markets, so you can make more sense of grain markets, join us for your free trial at GrainCents.