Recently in Wheat Category

The company behind the Chicago grain futures exchange, CME Group, is to launch a new Black Sea wheat futures contract on 6 June.

The contracts will be listed on the CBOT and there will be designated delivery points in Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian ports on the Black Sea.

“Now more than ever the world relies on the Black Sea region to produce wheat and other grains to meet our growing global demand for food,” said CME Group’s Tim Andriesen.

“We firmly believe this contract will not only establish an effective forward market for regional wheat prices, but has the potential to develop into a true regional benchmark pricing tool for wheat.”

It is almost a year since the Ensus bioethanol plant on Teesside closed temporarily, but there is still no confirmed date for its reopening, despite reports that maintenance work has been stepped up.

A Reuters article on Monday (23 April) suggested work to speed up the restart of the refinery had begun, but an Ensus spokesman told Farmers Weekly that while some engineering work was going on, no restart date had yet been scheduled.

The plant closed last May due to unfavourable market and regulatory conditions, although most of these issues are now being resolved.

Ensus has capacity to produce more than 400m litres of bioethanol and 350,000t of high protein animal feed from just over one million tonnes of feed wheat.

Gleadell has loaded 25,000t of British milling wheat from onto the Falcon Trader, set for Algeria.

“With UK farmers producing another quality crop this year, the Algerian market represents an important alternative for farmers from The Wash across to Leicestershire and up into Yorkshire,” said David Sheppard managing director.

Demand for big bale straw remains strong, but there appears to be less buying interest for hay, according to reports from two recent sales.

In the Cotswolds 3221 big wheat straw bales averaged £17.95 each, to a top of £24 at Tayler & Fletcher’s sale. Big bale barley straw averaged £24.26, to a top of £33, while meadow hay averaged £33 a bale.

Prices were down slightly on the firm’s November sale and Adrian Cannon said that while over 80% of straw was sold, less than half the hay on offer was cleared. “There seems to be plenty of hay around and people are thinking they’re not going to need as much as expected,” he said.

There was a similar picture at Alexanders of Huntingdon, where all the big bale straw was sold, at an average price of £18.66 each for 1300 wheat bales and £25.90 for 757 barley straw bales. Big bale meadow hay averaged £36 a bale.