THIS Indian summer has allowed harvest to proceed and nearly all the cereal crops in the Borders are tidied up, with balers close behind the combines as well.

Beans will be a week or two before they are ready but this spell of weather is allowing winter crop planting to continue unabated and into good soil conditions.

No doubt we will be crying out soon for rain to chit the newly sown crops with dry weather causing problems elsewhere around the world.

Dry conditions in the Ukraine and Russia have held up planting of their oilseed rape crop and the Ukraine is reporting the driest August for more than 50 years.

Drought is also being reported in key production areas of Brazil and drought conditions have restricted palm oil production in Indonesia. Ironically, frost in Australia is also causing problems for its canola crop as well.

We have had 21 mm or less than inch inch of rain in September and the dry weather is forecast to last at least until the beginning of next week. For the year to date, in may part of the Borders, we have had 408mm or 16 inches of rain, compared to last year when we had only 9 mm of rain in September and 445mm or 17.5 inches of rain for the year to date.

As if spirits were lifted by the good weather, the Liffe feed wheat futures for November, 2015, this week were up £5.35 to £115.80 and this rise was as a result of continued dry conditions around the world where the Ukraine and Russia jointly account for 25% of global wheat exports and saw the biggest daily change in prices since last July.

Price rises in the physical market have not followed, though due to the UK being awash with wheat that is failing to attract domestic demand or any export interest.

UK ex farm price for bread milling wheat is down 20p to £121.10 and feed wheat is down £1 to £100.40. Feed barley is also down 20p to £90 and oilseed rape delivered Erith is unchanged at £265.

Current ex-farm prices suggest that feed barley is more competitive against feed wheat than at this point last year. Average UK feed barley prices are around £10 lower than ex-farm feed wheat, compared to £8 a year ago. Strong barley export demand last season resulted in UK ex farm feed barley prices just £7 below feed wheat.

Eurozone and UK futures values also benefited from a relative strengthening in the US dollar against the euro and sterling, recovering the previous week's losses and more.

The International Grains Council has further increased global wheat production by another 7m tonnes and the total now stands at 727m tonnes and stock estimates are increased to a record 211m tonnes. The stocks to use ratio has now increased to 29.5% and 146m tonnes is expected to be used for stock feed.

The UK is expected to produce a 2015 wheat crop of around 15.5m tonnes compared to 16.6m tonnes last year, so the UK is not responsible for adding to the extra global tonnage this year. The AHDB has reviewed how it estimates UK cereal stocks and the 2014/15 wheat closing stocks are now estimated at 2.426m tonnes which will represent the opening stocks figure for 2015/16.

Global maize production is down from 1005m tonnes last year to 967m tonnes and end stocks are down 4m tonnes to 199m tonnes.

However, Chinese maize imports are forecast to fall from 5.4m tonnes last year to 2.8m tonnes in 2015 but its end season stocks are expected to rise to 90m tonnes.

With the barley harvest more or less complete, there has been the problem of split grains in malting samples but with good yields overall and a big crop already in the store, there should be plenty of malting quality barley to satisfy demand.

A big, good quality barley crop across Europe has left the market as a whole in surplus and, with the world economic situation and beer demand low, getting rid of this surplus is going to be difficult. UK malting barley users currently have plenty of cover and any new demand seems very unlikely this backend.

UK feed barley exports to Spain and Portugal continue but domestic demand for feed barley is slow as there is no need to buy forward with such large tonnage available in store.