The harvest of the 2018/2019 soyabean crop came last week, to 75% of the area in Brazil, according to survey AgRural consulting. The figure represents a gain of 8% points in one week and exceeds 71% in one year. On average over the last five years, fieldwork has reached 70%. With work virtually closed in the Midwest and Southeast, and entering the final stretch in Paraná, the action is now concentrated in Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Matopiba. Dry weather this week has allowed harvesters to move faster in the south. In Paraná, where in the last two weeks the percentage harvested had fallen behind last year’s figures, the work resumed its breath and reached 81% of the area. The advance was also good in Santa Catarina, where 49% of the area is harvested. But who actually harvested so much soya this week was Rio Grande do Sul, whose percentage harvested jumped from 7% to 25%. In the Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia (Matopiba) regions, the rains that were scheduled for the end of March were confirmed and hampered the harvest in some areas. But, fearing quality problems, most farmers harvested in the rainy season, even with high humidity in the grains and isolated cases of damaged grain. In March, AgRural made a slight upward adjustment in its soyabean production estimate for Brazil’s 2018/2019 crop, which went from 112.5 million tons to 112.9 million tons. The initial expectation, before the hot and dry weather wave of December and January, was 121.4 million tons.
Source: Canal Rural