There has been a recent discussion in the office about whether our harvest reports have been getting too gloomy.
Certainly they have carried some pretty depressing headlines: "Sodden in Cornwall", "Battered in Hereford", "Saturated in Fyfe" have all been used to convey a picture of beleaguered cereal growers battling with the elements to get the corn in the barn.
And, judging by some of the recent photographs that have been sent into the office by FWi users, these headlines do present an accurate, if soggy, picture.
But it's not all bad news. The HGCA's latest harvest report confirms that about 90% of the UK's wheat crop is now completed, with yields just shy of 8t/ha and grain quality generally good. Not everyone, it seems, has had it so tough.
The big question now is what the crop will be worth to farmers - and here the prognosis is little better than the weather. Ex-farm values of UK wheat are stuck at around £88/t, while barley has slipped again to just £73/t....
This has been despite the fact that sterling has continued to weaken against the euro and the dollar, and farmer selling has all but dried up.
The world market has, however, been a bit more active, with Egypt stepping in last week for 180,000t of French wheat, 90,000t of Russian and 60,000t of American. Yemen has also been in the market for 60,000t of French.
But their buying activity has done little to bolster the wheat trade, while soya and maize markets have also been on the slide in response to continuing good weather in the USA and economic jitters in China.
Hopes for an El Nino weather pattern in the southern hemisphere also appear to be receding, with the Australian Met Office predicting only a "weak event" in 2010. The Australian wheat crop is now expected to come in at about 21m tonnes - the same as last year.
UK traders are now predicting a UK wheat export surplus of 3m tonnes this season. Getting rid of it is not going to be easy, unless sterling comes to the rescue again.
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