By Alastair Stewart
DTN South America Correspondent
SAO PAULO, Brazil (DTN) -- Brazil will plant more corn than ever before in 2015-16, despite depressed international prices.
But record production is not yet assured with weather risks accentuated in the Cerrado this season.
"Farmers will be planting a lot of corn. We are praying there will be enough rain for it, though," said Osmar Frizzo, vice-president of the farm union in Querencia, a municipality in eastern Mato Grosso.
With harvesting around 40% complete, the summer corn crop appears to be a bumper one with southern fields returning early yields of 140 to 160 bushels per acre.
Crops also look good in the southeast and, as a result, the first crop is pegged at around 28 million metric tons (mmt). That's down 5% from last year, but planted area was down 7%.
The decline in summer planting has become a trend in recent years as more and more farmers instead plant second-crop corn after soybeans.
For a while last year, however, it was uncertain that second-crop corn area would grow markedly in 2015-16 due to a lack of credit and depressed international prices.
But strong international demand prompted heavy forward sales, while the devaluation of the Brazilian real made margins attractive.
As a result, second-crop corn area will increase more than 10% this season to over 26 million acres.
Delays to soybean harvesting have pushed back second-crop corn planting in the top-producing Cerrado region. That's bad news as corn has to go through key reproductive phases before April when summer rains typically give way to the dry Center-West Region winter.
In regions like northern and eastern Mato Grosso, the delays mean farmers will plant a portion of the crop outside the optimal window.
But farmers will plant anyway as they have already committed to sell a large portion of the crop.
Elsewhere, growers have made a major effort to plant before the optimal window closes at the end of February.
As a result, overall second-crop corn planting is actually a little ahead of last year. According to Safras e Mercado, a local farm consultancy, about 86% of projected second-crop land was planted as of March 4, up from 80% last year.
However, most of that corn was planted in the latter part of the optimal window, and the big question now is whether late-summer rains will be as abundant as they have been over the past two years.
The hope is that because rains arrived later in October, they will go on later, explained Carlos Alberto Petter, who farms 2,750 acres in Nova Xavantina, a municipality in eastern Mato Grosso.
Unfortunately, long-term weather models don't predict that, instead forecasting a mid-April end to the rain. The good news is that there is, as yet, no indication of a surge in La Nina activity that might increase the threat of winter fronts in Parana.
Meanwhile, January fertilizer delivery figures indicate that farmers may not be lavishing fields with NPK, but are investing in second-crop production. According to the Brazilian Fertilizer Distributors Association (ANDA), January deliveries were up 4% on the year at 2.1 mmt.
Alastair Stewart can be reached at alastair.stewart@dtn.com
(ES/AG)
© Copyright 2016 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.