"Catch Up" with the CropSpotters

October 11, 2011

I'm Just Waiting on a Rain

Mid-October brought rain in the south of Brazil—and teased more northerly Brazilian farmers with showers too light and scattered to get them to dust off the planters. Planting is moving along at a nice clip down in number-two Brazilian soybean producer, Paraná. But, though ahead of last year’s pace, it’s stumbling along at a laggardly five or six percent completed up in Mato Grosso—traditionally an early planting state.

To the north and east of there, up in Tocantins, CropSpotter José Edigar Andrade says it’s been hot and dry—93° to be specific. And “we’ve been three or four weeks now without rain.” Even so, José Edigar expects to start some planting by the 20th. Subscribers know “Zé” Edigar is a walking NOAA, and keeps track of weather patterns going back for years—and so he must have a pretty good idea that it’ll have rained enough by then.

CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla, over in Mato Grosso, Brazil’s top soybean state, hasn’t gotten out there either. “Yes,” he tells a questioner, “there are some fields being planted  around here, but the middle part of Campos de Júlio County, where he farms, hasn’t gotten enough precip for him to be planting… yet. The planting window for beans will be open for quite a while, so the La Nina-caused late arrival of the first rains isn’t necessarily a big deal, soybean-wise. But, as Ademir says, “we already late, which reduces second-crop corn.”

Rains have been slow in coming for Ademir’s Mato Grosso neighbor, CropSpotter Naildo Lopes, as well.  He says, “Planting in our area has been spotty, as the rains still haven’t gotten normal. And that should set planting back. We have localized showers, and just today I was visiting some farmers in a township that still hasn’t started planting.”

But lack of planting hasn’t kept Naildo from selling his 2011-12 production. “I’ve already locked in the sales of part of my beans, at $9.60 per bushel, and part at $10.45. I locked in my prices the moment I saw that my production costs would hit (the equivalent of) 38.6 bushels per acre.”

Naildo has also been wise on the buying side: he got his 0-18-18 at $520 per metric ton back in May. It’s up to $580 now, he says.

So now, it’s a matter of sitting and waiting for the rain. Naildo Lopes says, “My seed is in the shed, and everything should be ready to start planting on November 13.” And Zé Edigar Andrade says his truck is picking up his seed right now.

And so the CropSpotters are ready for 2011-12. We hope you’ll join us each week, starting in November, to follow crop progress.

September 27, 2011

We still haven’t seen much rain across the soybean-producing regions of Brazil, a fact which has the most eager Mato Grosso double-croppers cursing La Nina and sneaking upward glances at the sky. While searching for any hint of rainclouds, some of them may have seen the U.S. dollar soaring toward the sun, as the greenback achieved double-digit gains against Brazil’s real in September.

The dollar’s Daedalus-like flight was hardly a tragedy to most Brazilian farmers this year, as, finally having dug themselves out of a financial hole, many of them had already made their inputs purchases at a time when the U.S. currency was weaker. The U.S. dollar went as high as 1.9:1 against the real in the third week of September, before dropping to a higher-than-before, but not as lofty, cruising altitude of about 1.8:1.

That said, not all Brazilian producers cheered the news of the dollar’s strengthening.  CropSpotter Ildo Gubert, way up in Roraíma state, told us “I understand that the dollar’s gains are not good business for producers around the world. That’s because (an expensive dollar) keeps the market from doing business, due to world economic instability. So it’s not a good thing for us producers.”

Changes

Another bit of news this month which isn’t good news for producers is the end of CropSpotter Edison Ponti’s weekly reports. Dr. Edison came to a deal over August and September to sell his property. His farm, just outside of Londrina, Paraná, is an orderly and productive machine, close to town, and near the paved roads. We don’t know how much he got for it, but we do know he’ll be paid in installments—in bushels of soybeans. Another reason to hope the dollar stays strong.

Over the seasons, Edison Ponti’s weekly reports have been among the most precise, organized and information-packed of all the CropSpotters, and we will miss him. Make sure you check out the site when we begin the next season’s weekly reports—in November—to see new reports from Paraná!

Renter

Meanwhile, down south, CropSpotter Eroni Paniz told us he’s got a new renter lined up for his farm, who’s going to produce soybeans. Eroni tells us the new guy has already been at work on the soil, and that he’ll start planting as soon as he gets enough moisture. Past relationships with renters haven’t worked out for Eroni, so we’ve got our fingers crossed for this year.

Eroni tells us he’s providing the land, and his renter covers the rest. “I think the arrangement is going to be good—at least I hope so!!” he wrote. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

 Mato Grosso

Finally, we checked in with CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla, who, along with Naildo Lopes, will cover Brazil’s top-producing soybean state for us. Ademir said he and his neighbors are spending a good amount of time staring up at the sky these days. But “it’s rained only in localized areas across the region, though people really like to have soybeans sprouted by September 15 (the day the no-soy period ends in that state—ed.) But we’re just going to have to wait a little longer.”

July 26, 2011

Okay, it’s time to get away from derecho winds and congressional bickering over the debt ceiling. Just for a few minutes, anyway. Come with us to South America, for a July check on what Brazilian farmers are up to in the off-season.

Vacation is a big part of winter activities, and lots of Brazilian farmers’ leisure trips involve big distances. After all, the story of Brazil’s northward-expanding ag frontier is largely a story of southerners who moved north as farm sizes shrunk in the country’s south. Ildo Gubert travels some 1900 miles each way just about every year from his farm in Rondônia  down to Paraná, to visit his dad. Up in Piauí state, Idemar Cover goes about as far to see family down south.

In fact, famous farmer (and now federal senator) Blairo Maggi’s family is from Paraná. And the family of the Mato Grosso senator before him comes from Rio Grande do Sul state.

And so Mato Grosso CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla wrote us this week from the capital of the southern state of Paraná, where he said temps are a “nice and cold 50°.”

He said that, before he left, neighbors were busy bringing in the sunflower crop and finishing up the 2nd-crop corn, the cotton and the sorghum.  There’s plenty of work awaiting him, too, once he gets back to Mato Grosso. “August will be busy with eucalyptus harvesting,” he said. “We’ll harvest the first part of it for making charcoal for grain drying.”

Fuel Prices, Mato Grosso
$5.31	Diesel at pump, Mato Grosso
$4.20	Ethanol at pump, Mato Grosso

Leonardo Dequech, who farms up in Maranhão, isn’t traveling these days, though. And, if he were, he says, he doesn’t think he’d use any ethanol right now. He told us that ethanol prices have been so high that he hasn’t even once put any into his new flex-fuel car since he bought it. (Check out the weekly Brazil Ag News Roundup for more on the ethanol situation. It’s available to site subscribers. )

Prices in Maranhão
$392 tonne	SuperSimple fertilizer, at port
$411 tonne	Supersimple on farm
$4.57	Diesel on farm, 2640-gallon load
$4.94	Diesel at pump
$5.44	Ethanol at pump

Spending his time on the farm rather than traveling, Leonardo told us he’s planning to plant 90 percent of his acres (after subtracting 35 percent for the permanent reserve) in soybeans, and 10 percent in corn. He says the share of corn in his mix is low “because the big grain companies don’t buy it,” and because there just isn’t technology in his area for high production. At any rate, he says, “the current price picture hasn’t changed our thoughts about planted area.” The biggest limiting factor, instead, he says, is corn genetics for higher yields.

Up in Maranhão, the July routine is post-harvest work, including dragging a heavy chain over some brushy areas, leveling fields, taking down a few terraces and spreading lime. In his area, Leonardo says some neighbors are also harvesting dry beans, corn and some millet that was planted in January.
Next month, it’ll be time to clean up all the machinery, gather rocks and roots from the fields, and get ready to broadcast millet seed at the first rains of the next season in order to build up some organic matter ahead of soybean planting.

In the meantime, Brazilian producers are among those watching the efforts in Washington DC to come to an agreement on the debt ceiling. As Ademir Rostirolla put it, “A debt default by the U.S. would be very bad for the world.”

June 29, 2011

This Just In...

We just caught up with CropSpotter Ildo Gubert, who told us he’d bought his inputs for the coming season back in March—making him part of those statistics showing Brazilian producers generally ahead of the game in terms of planning for next season. “The purchase was done as it typically is among Brazilian farmers,” he said. “That is, (I traded) bushels of beans for inputs, and it came to 22¼ bushels.”

He said he’s going all soybeans on his land in 2011-12.

And, for what it’s worth, Ildo drives a 2009 Chevy S-10.

June 28, 2011

Brazilian farmers bought 8.5 million metric tonnes of fertilizer in the first five months of the year—nearly 24 percent more than they bought in the same period of last year.  And the May, 2010 vs. May, 2011 comparison is even steeper: fertilizer deliveries we 63 percent greater this year. Within that, nitrogen fertilizers were up 20 percent for the five-month period, which would indicate greater planting intentions for coffee, rice—and second-crop corn.

Meanwhile, industry data point to gross sales of $1.4 billion in herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, in the Brazilian market, for the first four months of the year. And that puts those sales up by a reported four percent over the Jan-Apr period of 2010.

But not all Brazilian producers are rushing to get their inputs bought.

“I haven’t purchased any inputs yet,” Paraná CropSpotter Edison Ponti told us. “The chief reason is that I am unsure whether or not I’ll plant corn on part of my land. I was going to plant just beans, but corn has gone up a lot here in Brazil, and I’m waiting to see if the price trend firms up.” He adds that, if prices hold, he’ll opt to plant some corn with the beans—and only once he’s made that decision can he order inputs.

Meanwhile, some 1800 miles north of Edison Ponti’s farm, Maranhão farmer Leonardo Dequeche says he’s getting price quotes, but hasn’t bought anything yet. Still, unlike Edison Ponti, he already knows he’ll be looking for 700 tonnes of SuperSimple, at about $375/tonne) and a couple hundred tons of KCL ($669/tonne.)

And Dequeche knows this much: “In January, I’ll start planting millet, and then I’ll go in on 90 percent of the area with beans, and plant corn on the other ten percent.”

Mato Grosso CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla might have the winter cold on his mind more than planting intentions right now. “It got down to 48° on Monday at five in the morning,” he wrote us. “I had thought we weren’t going to have any more cold weather.”

With the cold on his mind, it’s probably a good thing Ademir has made some of his inputs purchases for the coming season. “I’ve bought some fertilizer at $616 per tonne, and conventional (soybean) seed at $24.29 per acre,” he said. And his plans for next season are centered on beans.

Most producers need a pickup to haul those inputs, and Leonardo Dequeche, up in Maranhão state travels in style, in a 2009 Toyota Hilux—complete with automatic transmission. And don’t try to take his Hilux away, either. “When  I trade it in,” he says, “it’ll be for the same model, as this is the best pickup I’ve owned yet.”

Over in Mato Grosso state, Ademir Rostirolla does farm business in a Chevy S-10 flex. And to keep his carbon footprint down—as in down close to zero—he’s planted 800,000 eucalyptus trees. That’s enough to make the drive down south to Paraná state, and have a chat with Edison Ponti about what corn prices are likely to do.

May 31, 2011

Photos from Edison Ponti

Prime CropSpotter Edison Ponti is traveling in Buenos Aires and Santiago, but he took the time to send in some photos of his wheat crop before he left. He says: "As can be seen in the photos, the wheat is looking good, but in the closer-up photo you can already spot some yellowing of leaves due to the dry weather that is predominating, and punishing our area."

Click each thumbnail to see a larger image.

May 26, 2011

Report from Edison Ponti

This just in from Prime CropSpotter Edison Ponti...

We’re in winter here in southern Brazil, and the mercury dropped as far as 48° on May 19.  Meanwhile, we’ve got a winter landscape here.

My wheat planting started this year on April 17, and finished on the 29th. There has been little rainfall, but it’s been enough for good crop development. And, statewide, the wheat crop is all planted.

Here in Paraná state, the crop has started to show some signs, though, of hurting from the lack of precipitation. Still, the stand is good in my wheat, and quality still looks good.

The average high for the past week was 75°, and the average low came to 50°. Average evapotranspiration for the week was .01 inch per day, as the sunshine has been as strong as what we normally get in the summer.

And we’re at a 3.1 inch moisture deficit in my area, as you can see on the map.

Speaking of soil moisture, we got very little precip in the month of April. And we will still have to see about May. But here’s a chart of recent rainfall which you might find interesting. The soil is dry, and it could start to hurt the wheat and corn planted on the worst-hit places on the soil moisture map.

Daily Data from the Londrina Weather Station

May 2011
day	max ºF	min ºF	precip inches	Relative  humidity %
1	74	62	.27	89
2	68	53	.1	65
3	71	48	-	58
4	77	49	-	65
5	82	52	-	61
6	88	59	-	61
7	82	60	-	67
8	84	59	-	73
9	85	61	-	71
10	78	62	-	76
11	79	60	-	82
12	80	62	-	82
13	76	62	-	73
14	77	58	-	66
15	74	57	-	79
16	73	53	-	67
17	70	52	-	69
18	70	52	-	68
19	72	48	-	67
20	74	49	-	67
21	77	52	-	62
22	77	53	-	70
23	80	55	-	66
TOTAL			0.37

 

April 2011
Day		High  F	Low F	Precip. Inches	Relative Humidity
1		86	64	---	66
2		85	70	--	75
3		73	69	--	93
4		81	66	.2	85
5		86	65	.04	65
6		85	59	--	58
7		85	60	--	63
8		85	62	--	57
9		85	60	--	56
10		80	58	--	59
11		85	58	--	61
12		72	59	.24	93
13		68	62	1.6	96
14		86	59	.33	73
15		86	66	--	67
16		86	66	--	74
17		86	69	--	68
18		89	66	--	63
19		85	65	--	68
20		85	64	--	69
21		86	64	--	74
22		87	63	--	65
23		88	56	--	63
24		82	62	--	68
25		71	65	.35	97
26		76	61	.65	71
27		74	59	--	71
28		76	57	--	73
29		79	58	--	74
30		71	59	--	87
TOTAL				3.4

 

Anyway, the talk among producers these days is the possibility that the new Forest Code will be voted on shortly. It’s probably old news by now, and has become something they’ve gone over and over and over again on TV, as if it were a soap opera—full of intrigue, bald-faced lies and dirty tricks. We’ll see how it all turns out when it’s all over.

May 24, 2011

Dry May

It’s not like there’s no snow in Brazil. But it’s limited to the far South—and then, to the higher altitudes. So the winter season isn’t exactly cold, especially as you approach the Equator. But it’s dry. Very dry.

And the dearth of moisture is what’s been on CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla’s mind since planted his second crop after the bean harvest. It was a bean harvest made late by the tardiness of La Nina rainfall, which readers will recall kept combines parked for days on end alongside soggy fields and rang up some serious dockage figures.

Rostirolla and neighbors had already bought their seed corn, and needed the rotation at any rate. And so they risked planting that second-crop corn late in the hopes that the La Nina Effect would not just delay the onset of rain, but also delay its end.

It didn’t.

Prices rise, fields dry out

“The rain stopped once and for all fifteen days ago,” Rostirolla said, “with only a few showers scattered across Mato Grosso state.” So he and other second-crop corn producers in Campos de Júlio, Mato Grosso, “are already adding up irreversible losses of 35 percent on the crop.”

That’s bad enough, but the sorrow only deepens when producers see local corn prices shooting up as much as 115 percent over last year.

And as prices rise, the count of days without rain on Mato Grosso corn fields lengthens. Rostirolla says there are some fields in the region that have gone 45 days without rain, and those are lost outright. “But the longest any of my fields has gone is 15 days.” Prices in the accompanying chart are converted to bushels and into dollars at the contemporary exchange rate.

Farther afield

Rostirolla’s Mato Grosso neighbor, Naildo Lopes, meanwhile, is spending the outset of his off season over in the state far away from concerns about second-crop corn. He says he’s in Ceará state this week,

“I’m looking into a project for irrigated fruit production,” he told us. Naildo, who is an agronomist as well as a farmer, says that, he and a group may soon invest in irrigate fruit and even flower production there. Now that’s diversifying your portfolio.

Lopes says that, while there, he say’s going to look into shrimp and lobster there. If we were with him on the trip, it would me a matter of biting into shrimp and lobster, rather than just looking.

Another of the CropSpotters who’s spending part of the month diversifying is José Edigar Andrade, from Tocantins. He’s been working on what he often lightly tells us is his retirement plan: getting natural latex production going on his farm. He tells us “We’ve already got 40,000 saplings transplanted, and we’re planning on 65,000.”

He’s also spending some time on his confinement operation, where he plans to have up to 600 head this year. And he’s swapping out their menu while he’s at it. Andrade says he’s getting some sugarcane bagasse from the local Bunge distillery, and he’s going to try feeding it to the animals as an experiment. “Since we don’t know what the conversion rate will be,” he says, “we’ll mix it in with a bit of silage as well.”

As for the La Nina phenomenon that’s knocking Ademir Rostirolla’s Mato Grosso corn back, Andrade says he’s measured more than 53 inches of rain since the first of the year, and above 76 inches for the crop year to date.

José Edigar Andrade’s Local Prices Late May, 2011
Spot corn, US$/bu	$6.54
Sorghum US$/bu	$4.19

But all’s well with the second crops. “Our corn is in the dent stage, and both the sorghum and millet are in grain-fill. If I were to take a guess, I’d say we’re going to manage to get something like 67 bushels of corn per acre, and about half of that for the sorghum.”

Down in the next state south of Tocantins, in Goiás, where CropSpotter Rodrigo Prata had such a tough time with incessant rain at harvest, we’re guessing he’d love to see yield figures like Andrade cites. A busy Prata took time to tell us he’s just now getting to the burndown work in the fields where he had planted beans, and harvesting corn. No word on his yield figures.

A couple, like José Edigar Andrade and Mato Grosso’s Ademir Rostirolla, say they haven’t bought the next crop’s inputs yet, despite reports for Brazil at large of early fertilizer purchases in an effort to control costs.

And nobody says their concerned about snow and ice this winter—though Brazil’s Institute of Meteorology cited that the City of São Paulo had marked its lowest early-morning temperature of 2011 by May 23rd— a bone-chilling 54°. It’s enough to make you call Naildo Lopes, and see if there might be another seat on the plane to /Ceará.

May 10, 2011

Fertilizer, Rain and Levees

Just about all the beans in the Londrina, Paraná area have been harvested—and that includes Prime CropSpotter Edison Ponti’s fields. When we last saw him—just a couple of weeks ago—Edison told us he was eager to get his wheat crop in, but that the weather wasn’t letting him into fields.

The down time gave Ponti a chance to take ag economist David Asbridge through the town’s annual ag fair, where the two met with associations, cooperatives (Ponti’s area of Brazil—the South—is strong in the ag co-op tradition,) and product resellers. CropSpotters had asked Asbridge—who’s been on investigative tours of Brazil several times before—down, to talk a bit about what’s happening next in the world of fertilizers.

Having been stopped for a São Paulo interview by Brazil’s leading ag magazine, Globo Rural, Asbridge was there to bring Londrina producers up to speed on where he saw the fertilizer market going.

But producers gathered at his presentation wanted to know more—like how farm programs work in the Farm Bill. Asbridge, who, as economist at the American Soybean Association, has contributed to a couple of Farm Bills, simplified and explained, and walked them through the mechanics. The Brazilians, it seemed, didn’t realize that U.S. farmers don’t just go to the mailbox for a big check at the end of the year—and that the checks aren’t that big.

Which is one reason www.cropspotters.com is around: to try to help overcome some of the misconceptions American and Brazilian agriculture sometimes hold to, because they’re not getting all the information.

At any rate, Ponti told us afterward that corn costs more for him to grow mostly because of the fertilizer costs—while he’s managed a couple of good soybean crops in a row, now, without any fertilizer. “So my cost-benefit relationship is a lot better with soybeans—even when corn prices are above historic averages.”

He says he’ll only plant corn if fertilizer costs go down. Way down. Or if corn prices get, well, exuberant. If he had to make the next crop’s planting decisions today, he says “I would plant soybeans. Just soybeans.”

When we caught up with Minas Gerais CropSpotter Olavo Borges, he told us he’d just taken some soil samples in for analysis, in a first step toward next season. Meanwhile his sorghum is doing pretty well despite getting the sort of dry weather he had prayed for as he lost much of his soybean crop.  We can imagine he would have given a lot to have these past seven rain-free days removed from the present and dropped into March some time.

Next on his to-do list: There’s 120 acres of sugarcane that will need to be harvested at the end of the month, and some chemicals to apply in the meantime.

Up in Tocantins, Prime CropSpotter José Edigar Andrade also says that, right now, he’s planning on beans next season—almost 3,000 acres of beans. “For us around here,” he says “soybeans are instant liquidity like you don’t have with corn.” He adds that, when considering your cropping decisions in Brazil, you’ve got to take limited storage into account. “The priority is the beans around here,” he says. “The corn might have to wait out In the field.”

But some CropSpotters have been more involved in off the farm activities since the bean crop was finished. Over in Mato Grosso, CropSpotter Naildo Lopes he’s been to the federal capital of Brasília a couple of times since the beans were brought in, working with producers  We bet he’d rather be fishing.

Naildo told us he thinks Mato Grosso’s soybean planted area will stay the same in the 2011-12 crop year, given that “seed and inputs have already been bought for 70 percent of the projected area.”

Don’t ever underestimate the U.S. producer

All eyes here are also on the weather situation in the U.S.—especially the latest USDA report showing how fast Iowa has caught up with corn planting, and the opening of the Mississippi River levee.

One tweet (a brief message posted on the Twitter social networking service) from a Brazilian commodities analyst down here announced the amazing jump in Iowa corn planting in just one week’s time, and said “Don’t ever underestimate the American farmer!”

And CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla told us he was glad to see the corn crop going in—as one suspects he means he’s glad the U.S. may not end up having to switch a lot of those corn acres over to soybeans as rains keep planters out of fields.

But, despite the competition, there’s sympathy over the heavy rains that have set planting back and kept some U.S. farmers in the tractor seat for most of the day, each day this past week. As Edison Ponti wrote in an e-mail, “Agriculture is a really risky thing to be engaged in. All of us producers have vivid and painful experiences we’ve gone through. So we feel solidarity with the American producers, with all the weather challenges they’ve faced, and the damage the weather has been inflicting on their fields.”