‘With the AHDB figures showing that our own wheat sowings in the UK are down by 9% on the year, the poor crop establishment and difficult growing season we’ve had so far are bound to be reflected an even bigger drop in overall production than this figure would suggest.

One of the more farmer-sounding headlines I’ve read in a while appeared in a recent press release from Copa, the umbrella group of European farming unions.

It read: “Harvest 2024 – Poor outlook for cereals… but situation might worsen.”

While this display of the blatant pessimism of which we can be guilty of might have made me smile for a moment, in truth it’s actually a sad reflection of the state of the arable sector across much of continental Europe, with most of the big players on this side of the Atlantic pruning their production estimates from an already low figure.

In that press release, Copa was predicting that the cereal production in the EU-27 was likely to stand at around 257.3m tonnes this year – down nearly 5% on the 2023 harvest.

Further east there have also been lower predictions of production in Ukraine, falling from 23m tonnes last year to closer to 19.5m this year.

Meanwhile, Russia’s official production forecasts still yo-yo up and down, seemingly influenced more by political whim than even the weather (though all external predictions put it at substantially lower than last year, down from over 90m tonnes to closer to 83m tonnes) – so there’s a real chance that there will be substantially less grain floating about the continent in the coming year.

Sane world

Of course, in a sane world in which the stocks-to-use ratio has been dwindling, a wee shortage would lead to some prospect of an improvement in prices.

But in a world where the price of local supplies is always trumped by the global market, the endless hype including this week’s United States Department of Agriculture’s World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) update, predicting potentially better crops – especially of maize – in the US and other American countries appears to have seen a foot placed on the market’s windpipe.

As a bit of an aside, and while it’s hard to credit, apparently last weekend’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump might have contributed to the further slide in the wheat future prices at the beginning of this week. By delivering a political boost to the former president’s campaign which has seen him now widely viewed as the frontrunner, fears in the market that his re-election could see the trade wars with China reignited were being expressed among grain trader in the States.

For, while China is still reckoned to be the world’s largest grower of wheat, producing an estimated 140m tonnes (and while official statistics from the region are always taken with a pinch of salt), the country also remains one of the largest importers of wheat, with the grain trade reckoning that it will need to buy in around 12m tonnes in the coming year, around two million tonnes back on last year’s figure.

But where that will come from is also likely to be as much about politics as it is about out and out economics.

Prepare for the unthinkable

But, in an interesting move, Norway has shown that not everyone has total faith in the global supply chain.

In recent weeks, the country’s government has announced that as part of a plan to ‘be prepared for the unthinkable’, it is to buy and store 82,500 tonnes of wheat by the end of the decade in order to build up a contingency stock of food grains which would feed the country’s population for three months in an emergency situation.

Now that’s a real commitment towards food security – and the stockpiling has been attributed to increasing uncertainty following not only the Covid-19 pandemic but also the war in Europe and the increasing unpredictable effects of climate change.

“There should be an extra level of security in the event of a major disruption in international trade systems or failure of national production,” said the oil-rich country’s finance minister. “This is an important part of the government’s work to strengthen national preparedness.”

Over to you, Sir Keir…

Back 150,000 tonnes

Back at the ranch, however, with the AHDB figures showing that our own wheat sowings in the UK are down by 9% on the year, the poor crop establishment and difficult growing season we’ve had so far are bound to be reflected by an even bigger drop in overall production than this figure would suggest. Some reports from the early start of harvest down south certainly haven’t painted a picture that would suggest that yields are keen to do anything to lessen the blow.

Last week, I heard a market expert predicting that the combination of reduced plantings and lower yields could see the Scottish wheat crop back by as much as 150,000 tonnes on the year, and with plenty of reasonably priced maize floating about there’s always the fear that some distilleries might switch to this imported product.

However, while the winter barley acreage is also down an estimated 12%, there’s a chance that, weather permitting, it might allow a fairly early start to the harvest season, with a good deal of the acreage in many parts of Scotland already having had a spray of pre-harvest roundup.

Mind you, while I don’t believe we’re under any regulatory restrictions on using glyphosate in this way as of yet, the practice has been outlawed for those in Europe who are still operating under the CAP, as this was one of the concessions to the Greens which hasn’t been reversed.

Liquid sunshine

And, with such a ban in place on much of the continent, I’d have some suspicions over just how long we’re going to be allowed to continue to use the “liquid sunshine” in this manner over here as well.

Of course, there is still a bit of a get-out clause for EU producers as, while its use as a pre-harvest desiccant is outlawed, it can still be used pre-harvest to control an exceptionally heavy weed infestation.

But, as someone said, the only real alternative to glyphosate is real sunshine – but sadly, however, it’s often out of stock just when you need it!