Argentina has completed a record 55.5 million-ton soyabean harvest despite having lost 860,000 hectares, or 4.2 percent of total 2013/14 planting area due to excessively wet weather, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said on Thursday.
The previous record was 55 million tonnes collected in the 2009/10 crop year, it said. "Despite significant delays throughout the farm belt and the fact that some central and southern parts of Buenos Aires province have still not been harvested, the season is over," the exchange said in its weekly crop report.
"The areas yet to be harvested are not significant, and delays caused by rain could continue for several weeks without impacting our crop estimate," it said. Eighty percent of Argentina 2013/14 commercial use corn crop had been collected as of Thursday, the exchange said.
The harvest advanced 7 percentage points during the week but lagged the previous season's pace by 20 percentage points due to wet weather that slowed harvesting combines as they tried to move over soggy Pampas fields. "Early-planted corn has yet to be collected only in some areas of north-western Argentina," the exchange said.
