E-Malt.com News article: USA: The barley market is in a weather market situation right now

The barley market is in a weather market situation right now, according to Randy Brag, barley marketer at Valley Grain Co. in Casselton, N.D., and it's a rather hard market to determine, North Dakota's Ag Newspaper posted on July 7. There is still a lot of carryover crop yet to move, but barley movement from the farm at this time is slow.

Brag attributes this to two factors: first farmers are hoping that prices will improve, especially in light of news of excessive rainfall in such a wide area; and secondly, many of the farm yards are so soggy, trucks can't get to the grain bins for loading.

"However, the feeling is they are going to have to start moving barley during July," Brag noted. "First, the farmers are going to have to start cleaning out some bins for the upcoming crop. Also, some of the maltsters, like Busch and Cargill are going to start calling in come of their contracted bushels from last year's crop in July. So come July, we are going to start to see some barley moving, one way or another.

"We've seen the market in beans and corn get hammered here this week," he continued. "Prior to that, things looked friendly to feed barley with corn and beans going up, but now things don't look so friendly anymore. And that's just we can expect to see with this weather market."

Brag said he has noticed a trend over the past couple of weeks for feed barley to be off by a nickel, but there has been a little action out in the country that has put a little strength in the malting barley prices, but that could be short-lived as the maltsters start calling in the contracted barley from last year.

Potential downward pressure on barley prices also comes from the barley harvest starting in California and the reported good conditions of the barley crops in most barley producing areas.

"A week or so ago, I heard Idaho's barley crop was rated 98 percent excellent," he said. "And that's unheard of.

"On the feed barley side I think we possibly have some short term downward pressure until we really get a handle on what's happening with the corn crop," Brag noted. "On the malting side - that's a big question mark. We are going to have good areas and we are going to have poor areas. Is there going to be a high rate of VOM in some areas? Is the crop going to flood out in other parts? We got a lot of questions to be answered in the next 30 days."

Local elevator prices indicated only small price movements during the past two weeks. A check of board prices on the website smallgrains.org, indicated feed barley prices were off a nickel in some places and in other locations they gained a nickel.

The highest feed barley price quoted was $1.42 and the lowest was $1.23 per bushel. Malting barley prices showed little change as well. Prices, compared to two weeks ago, were unchanged to up a dime. Local elevator malting barley quotes ranged from a high of $2.10 a bushel to a low of $1.68.


10 July, 2005