Argentina soy planting to cover 16 mln hectares this season -govt

Argentina’s 2023/24 soy planting area will be an estimated 16 million hectares (39.54 million acres), the government said, the same as the previous drought-hit season in one of the world’s top exporters of processed soy oil and meal.

While the soy planting area forecast matches the area planted last season, the government trimmed its estimate for the 2023/24 wheat planting area to 5.6 million hectares, from a previous forecast of 5.8 million.

“A drop in the area estimate was decided given the lack of adequate rainfall and the prevalent drought conditions in the previous period,” Argentina’s agriculture secretariat said in its monthly grain report.

For 2023/24 corn, the government kept its area estimate stable at 10.5 million hectares.

Meanwhile the Buenos Aires grains exchange said in its weekly crop report on Thursday some wheat producers had decided to bring forward the current wheat harvest in northern Argentina, due to high temperatures that have affected crop yields.

The exchange estimates the current wheat harvest at 16.5 million metric tons from a planting area of 5.9 million hectares.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Maximilian Heath; Writing by Brendan O’Boyle; Editing by Sandra Maler)