Weather again affects grain production in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state

The La Niña phenomenon, which influences the rainfall regime in the South of Brazil for the third consecutive season, has already brought the first negative impact for the grain crop in Rio Grande do Sul in this 2022/23 cycle.

With the problems, consultancy StoneX reduced to 4.5 million tons its estimate for the summer corn harvest in the state from the 5.4 million tons projected at the beginning of the month.

In August, Emater-RS’ projection pointed to a summer corn harvest of 6.1 million tons, down from 2.9 million in the drought-plagued 2021/22 crop.

“The irregularity of the rains in the state during the second half of November and during the first weeks of December, a crucial moment for determining the productive potential, ended up leading to losses in productivity,” evaluated StoneX, in a bulletin.

For soybeans, which are in the final stage of planting, the consulting firm said that the adverse weather has not yet brought risks of falling yields.

Emater expects a harvest of 20.5 million tons, compared to the 9.1 million of the damaged 2021/22 season.

Also, according to the company, the occurrence of ideal rains may still ease the situation of corn crops, but new losses are not ruled out.

“We need regular rains in January and February. There is no point in raining 100 millimeters in one day and no water falling in the next 30 days.

The ideal scenario would be a daily rainfall volume of 20 millimeters, but as we are in La Niña season, rainfall irregularity should prevail”, reinforced João Pedro Lopes, StoneX market intelligence analyst.

According to the technical director of Emater-RS, Alencar Rugeri, all other areas suffer from irregular rainfall except for the state’s northeast.

Rugeri says there are reports of losses in small areas and considers that it is still early to revise the estimates on the gaucho production.

“Some producers took out insurance due to the drought. They may have a loss on the financial side to replant. But if we have the return of the rains, we can recover this delay,” said Rugeri.

Until last week, the corn planting in the state reached 90% of the expected area for the summer harvest of 2022/23. The pace of the work was below 92% of 2021 and 94% of the average.

Isolated and poorly distributed rainfall has set the tone recently, with temperatures rising to 35 °C.

After Christmas, the meteorology has signaled that the arrival of a cold front should ease the adverse weather scenario.

January should be a month with better rain distribution, which tends to benefit the agricultural areas of the state,” points out Flávio Varone, coordinator of the Agroclimatic Monitoring and Alert System (Simagro).