A WEEK of decent weather across the whole country has brought a sigh of relief and also serves to keep drying costs to a minimum – which is more than can be said for some parts of England, where some torrential rain has affected mopping up the remaining harvest.

So, this past 10 days will have seen major inroads into this year’s harvest, allowing winter barley and oilseed rape crops to be tidied up – with yields in general not as bad as predicted after the long dry spell earlier in the year – and even some spring barley has been cut.

However, the recent lack of sunshine means that this crop does not appear to have ripened as quickly as wheat, so combines have been busy cutting some milling wheat before the weather spoils the Hagberg numbers and quality.

It would appear that, to date, proteins have been lower than normal but otherwise quality is good and will command a significant premium over feed samples.

It might just pay off for Scottish growers to try and get their quality wheats in the best possible order, as the poor weather in the South of England harvest has been delayed and some quality samples are now heading for the feed heap. Poor weather in the south means that there is still around 50% of UK wheat to be cut and milling wheat prices have picked up on the back of that.

Feed prices have remained pretty static this past week even though Canada’s wheat estimated production rose by 1.5m tonnes. French prices rose by 2% as their wheat is being needed to replace that of Russia and Black Sea areas.

Markets are looking better due to the fact that Russian autumn wheat planted area is likely to be down by up to 35% and the floods in Pakistan will also account for more than 500,000 tonnes being taken off the market. The LIFFE feed wheat futures have risen by £2.40 on the week to £152 for November, 2010, and up £1.30 to £128.30 for November, 2011.

Germany is also now having poor weather and its wheat quality is suffering so there is going to be more feed quality wheat around, but the UK has had a good start to its wheat export campaign

Potentially, we are now heading for a tight second half of the season especially after Defra knocked 69,000 ha recently off the UK planted wheat area, thereby reducing our wheat tonnage by 500,000 tonnes.

The International Grains Council also tweaked its figures, showing a further 7m tonnes reduction in world production – but will still be the third largest on record, it reckons.

Spring barley in England has mostly been cut but only 15-20% of the crop in Scotland has come under the knife. Quality seems to be generally ‘good’ but yields poor at between 1½ to 2 tonnes per acre.

We should have enough malting barley to satisfy maltsters’ needs, though, due to the large carryover from last season. Worldwide, barley production dropped by 14% to 128m tonnes with Russia down 44%, Ukraine 24%, Canada 12%, European Union 10% and Australia down 8%.

However, EU Intervention stocks of 5.5m tonnes will take up some of the slack and the EU Commission has already granted export licences for more than 600,000 tonnes of barley from the open market within the last seven weeks, which is four times more than the corresponding period last year. That said, EU barley export licences now total 814,000 tonnes, compared to 192,000 tonnes last year.

And the old chestnut of small premioums for Scottish malting barley, means that large quantities of malting quality stock end up being exported as feed. Domestic barley buyers have little demand for spot barley as they take delivery of their pre-harvest contracts and animal feed buyers are currently looking at current barley prices due to the narrower discount to wheat prices.