wheat

Three states in the Great Plains - Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma - account for nearly half of crop insurance indemnities paid so far this year, say USDA data.

Seed and chemical company Monsanto announced an agreement with soft white wheat growers to settle three class-action lawsuits that arose from the discovery that some of its experimental genetically engineered wheat was growing wild in eastern Oregon.

Thanks to a second year of bumper crops, the world is headed for mammoth inventories of corn, wheat and soybeans, says the International Grains Council in London.

Colder-than-usual weather "is likely to spur further concerns over the condition of the winter wheat crop" in Russia, says The Crop Site. It points to uncertainties about the state of the crop.

Food and environmental groups are renewing calls for the Agriculture Department "to adopt a slower, more stringent approval process" for genetically engineered crops, says USA Today.

The World Bank says international food prices fell by 6 percent over a four-month stretch and are the lowest in four years. Lower wheat prices drove the decline, says the bank's Food Price Watch.

Researchers identified a wheat gene that acts as a reproductive traffic cop and which can be used to transfer valuable genes from other plants to wheat, says Washington State University. The discovery "clears the way for breeders to develop wheat varieties with the disease- and pest-resistance of other grasses...while forgoing the cost, regulatory hurdles and controversy of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs," says a WSU release.

A University of Missouri think tank lowered its forecasts of farm-gate prices for corn, wheat and soybeans because of huge inventories that are building up. It will take three years for prices to recover, said the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, which slashed by 10 percent its forecast of the average price for this year's corn crop, expected to be a record 14.4 billion bushels.

Australia expects to export the least amount of wheat in five years due to a smaller harvest and lower demand by China for the grain, said AgriMoney. The government forecaster ABARES said wheat exports would total 18.1 million tonnes in 2014/15. "The revised forecast represents a decline of 234,000 tonnes year on year and would represent the weakest performance since 2009/10 although still representing a higher number than the 10-year average," said AgriMoney. Australia is one of the five leading wheat exporters of the world.

The global Food Price Index fell by 3.6 percent in August to reach its lowest level in four year, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Prices for all commodities except for meat dropped markedly. Wheat and corn prices are the lowest in four years, said FAO. Meat is up 1.2 percent in a month and 14 percent higher than a year ago.

Monsanto agreed to settle lawsuits filed by growers of soft white wheat over the May 29, 2013, discovery of unapproved biotech wheat in an Oregon field, says broadcaster KCRU. The wheat was a strain genetically engineered by Monsanto to tolerate the weedkiller glyphosate but abandoned after field trials years ago. The growers say they lost money because Japan and South Korea temporarily curtailed purchases of U.S.-grown soft white wheat. Terms of the settlement, reached last week, were not disclosed.

Canada's wheat surplus at the start of this marking year was 9.8 million tonnes, up 94 percent from the year-earlier figure, said Statistics Canada. A record 3.7 million tonnes was in storage in Saskatchewan and storage in Alberta also was a record at 1.8 million tonnes as of Aug 1. The huge increases reflected "bumper production for many crops (in 2013), especially in the Prairies," it said.

Russia's Ministry of Agriculture forecasts record wheat exports of up to 30 million tonnes in the ongoing 2014/15 marketing year, said the Itar-Tass news agency.

The odds of a production slowdown for corn and wheat over the next two decades are 20 times higher with climate change than without, say researchers from Stanford University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Ag consultancy Doane says the first day of its crop tour found corn and soybeans in outstanding condition in western Illinois and eastern Iowa. "We believe it's the strongest corn crop we have observed in our long history of this crop tour," says its report. Doane says corn yields in western Illinois could be 10 bushels an acre higher than last year.

It may be months before USDA publishes a regulation but it is reminding farmers that the new farm policy law links so-called conservation compliance with eligibility for a discount on crop insurance. Operators have until next June 1 to file the paperwork, form AD-1026, the Highly Erodible Land Conservation and Wetland Conservation Certification.