Argentina soy, once parched, now has too much rain

Drenched Argentine fields due to heavy rains in the country’s farm heartland are raising fears of soybean losses and delayed sales of the 2024/25 crop, although drier weather on the horizon should bring relief to producers, industry experts said. Argentina is the world’s top exporter of soybean oil and meal, but combines are having difficulty entering waterlogged fields to begin harvesting following heavy rains in March and storms last week. On Thursday, the Buenos Aires grains exchange reported that the 2024/25 soybean harvest, estimated at 48.6 million tons, is 4 percentage points behind the average harvesting pace of the last five years. “The environment is very oversaturated. Harvesting this week had a terrible level of humidity. There was fog, mist. Everything was wet,” Germán Heinzenknecht, a meteorologist with the Applied Climatology Consulting Firm, told Reuters. Many fields and access roads in key agricultural areas are impassable, which, according to Cristian Russo, ...