SB harvest picks up pace and maize business accelerates

SB harvest picks up pace and maize business accelerates

The dry days that followed the end of this week allowed the threshing work to advance at good pace, and the advance of the SB harvest is in line with the five-year average. In maize, prices and market conditions accelerate business.

After having started somewhat slowly, SB threshing picked up pace in recent weeks, and 81% of the area to be harvested has already been reached, according to MAGyP data. Although this is below the 91% that was registered on the same date last year, in these last seven days it was possible to exceed the average of the last 5 years (80%).

About maize, also according to data provided by MAGyP, the progress of the harvest work reaches 40% of the target area, behind the 54% of a year ago and the 45% that, on average, had been harvested at this point in the last five seasons. In any case, as was commented in these lines of the Newsletter of the previous week, this responds to the fact that, as a result of the drought of September and October, several of the lots that were destined to be planted with first/early maize they had to choose to delay planting due to lack of water.

According to the information provided by the Strategic Guide for Agriculture, this delay in planting ended up being beneficial in some cases, since the late maize was less affected by the lack of rains in February than the early one and received enough water at key moments in the development of the crop. Although early yields were not as affected as SB, late maize presents good prospects in terms of yields. In addition, even though the rain forecasts were not fulfilled in recent weeks, this no longer affects the crop since it has reached its stage of physiological maturation and remains for it to dry out before it can be harvested.

Turning to the logistics of the grains that are being harvested, the entry of trucks with maize to the ports of the greater metropolitan area of Rosario city responds to this delay in the harvest compared to previous campaigns. Taking the income accumulated since February 11 (this date is taken since mid-February is when the harvest of the northernmost regions of Argentina begins), 270,000 trucks carrying maize arrived at the port terminals of the region, while in the last two years to this date, more than 315,000 had entered, the highest since the campaign began, denoting greater dynamism.

Concerning SB, taking the accumulated from March 11 to date, the number of trucks that arrived at the port terminals/processing plants of Upriver’s amounts to 274,000, thus evidencing an income rhythm that is in line with that of the last two years (275,000 in 2020 and 274,000 in 2019).

Turning to shipments, maize shipments from the ports of the great metropolitan area of Rosario mark a drop compared to 2020. In the first three months of the campaign, 8.4 Mt would be sent abroad from the aforementioned port´s terminals (for May considering what has already been shipped and the scheduled to ship), while in the same period of the previous year shipments reached 10.1 Mt. In addition, it is observed that shipments in May would be lower than in April (2.6 Mt vs. 3.2 Mt respectively). On the side of SB and its derivatives, in the first two months of the trade cycle, shipments of flour/pellets would reach 5.6 Mt (vs. 5.2 in the previous year), those of oil would be practically equal (1.21 Mt in this year vs. 1.17 in 2020), and SB shipments would register a fall since between April and May of this year they would add up to 300,000, while last year they totaled 1, 4 Mt in the same period.

The higher volume of SB by-products shipments responds to the improvement in export prices, particularly of SBO, which had a favorable impact on the gross margin. As a consequence, the level of crushing increased in April to 4.2 Mt, 24% above the industrialized in March and 15% above the volume processed in April 2020. Furthermore, it is the highest monthly volume since July of 2019, and the second-highest tonnage for April in history, only behind that processed in that month of 2015. The SBO production obtained thus reached 843,700 t, while the volume of SBP obtained added of 3.1 Mt.

Another noteworthy piece of data in recent weeks is what happened in the commercialization of maize. Despite the lower production projected for this season in relation to the previous one, the volume of commercialized grains grew strongly in the last month and exceeded the level reached in 2020/21 at this time of year. In the last four weeks, maize deals were closed for almost 5 Mt, and 27.9 Mt of the 48.5 Mt of projected production have already been.

Source: https://bcr.com.ar/

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