COMMODITIES : Crop Futures Weather Another Dry Day

Crop futures closed mixed Tuesday on the Chicago Board of Trade despite a third day of above-normal heat and only widely scattered thunderstorms in the nation’s Grain Belt.

On other markets, coffee futures plunged again, cotton was sharply lower, livestock and meat futures were mostly lower, precious metals slipped, energy futures declined and stock index futures advanced.

Corn and soybean futures settled mostly higher while wheat finished lower in Chicago. This surprised some traders who said they expected continued above-normal temperatures and dry weather to drive prices higher. John Frazier, a grain market specialist in Chicago with Balfour Maclaine, speculated that buying was limited by memories of steep losses in the soybean market in the previous two weeks and by a private forecaster’s prediction of widely scattered showers in the Corn Belt during the rest of the week.

The closely watched central Midwestern soybean crop will remain for the next few weeks in a critical pod-development and pod-filling stage when the plants are particularly sensitive to hot and dry weather. The National Weather Service has predicted normal precipitation but above-average temperatures for the region during the first five days of next week, however.

Coffee Futures Plummet

Michael R. Smith, president of WeatherData, a private forecasting concern in Wichita, Kan., said the weather outlook for the soybean crop is “slightly adverse, if you were rating it between beneficial, neutral and adverse.” Dry weather will dominate the next few days, the meteorologist told The Times, “but looking toward next week the chances of rain improve somewhat.”

Smith said temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s are somewhat higher than the 90-92 range more normal for the region in August.

Corn and oat futures followed the soybean market while wheat prices fell partly in reaction to news that the Agriculture Department had rejected China’s bid for 600,000 metric tons of subsidized U.S. wheat, analysts said.

Wheat settled 1.5 cents to 5.5 cents lower, with September at $3.755 a bushel; corn was 10.75 cents lower to 11 cents higher, with September at $3.01 a bushel; oats were 0.50 cent lower to 7.25 cents higher, with September at $2.8875 a bushel, and soybeans were 15 cents lower to 18 cents higher, with August at $8.29 a bushel.

Coffee futures plummeted for the fifth time in the last six sessions on New York’s Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange on fears that producer and consumer nation-members of the International Coffee Organization will be unable to come to an agreement on quotas, analysts said.

Beef Demand Falls

The September coffee contract settled 7.84 cents lower at $1.0883 a pound, compared to $1.3295 cents a pound just one week ago.

Cotton futures fell to new life-of-contract lows for all delivery months except October on the New York Cotton Exchange after a USDA report showed the cotton crop improving, analysts said.

October cotton settled 1.13 cents lower at 55.02 cents a pound.

Sagging demand for beef weighed on the cattle futures market at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the bearish sentiment spilled over into the neighboring pork pits, said Dale Durchholz, livestock analyst with AgriVisor Services Inc. in Bloomington, Ill.

Live cattle settled 0.28 cent to 1.33 cents lower, with August at 65.05 cents a pound.

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