French soft wheat condition worsens as harvest gets off to a slow start
Recasts, adds detail, background
July 5 (Reuters) -French soft wheat ratings deteriorated last week in the European Union's biggest producer of the cereal while first cuttings of what is expected to be a very poor crop got under way, farm office FranceAgriMer said on Friday.
Ratings of French soft wheat, the largest cultivated crop in the country, showed 58% of crops in good or excellent condition by July 1, down from 60% the previous week and 81% a year earlier. Detailed ratings showed 5% of the crop was in "very poor" condition, up from 2% last week.
The rating was the lowest for this time of year since 2020, when French wheat crops were also affected by heavy rain during planting, data in a FranceAgriMer cereal report showed.
Wet weather and soggy fields in France since the autumn delayed plantings, hurt plant development and increased crop disease.
French crop institute Arvalis and grain industry group Intercereales said on Friday that they expect this year's French soft wheat harvest to show a yield 11% below the 10-year average and at an eight-year low owing to a particularly wet crop year.
Analysts and traders expect France, the European Union's biggest wheat exporter, to harvest about 29-30 million metric tons of soft wheat, against 35 million tons last year.
Winter barley ratings fell even more sharply than wheat, with 56% of the crop in good/excellent condition, down from 63% a week earlier and 80% the previous year. The share of the crop in "very poor" condition also gained 3 percentage points to 5%.
For spring barley, good/excellent ratings fell to 69% from 73% the previous week and 76% a year earlier.
Dry weather allowed farmers to accelerate winter barley harvesting last week. The harvest progressed to 33% complete, up from only 1% a week earlier but still behind the fiver-year average of 41% gathered by this time of the year.
The soft wheat harvest finally started, with 1% gathered by July 1, against 8% last year and a five-year average of 5%.
Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide, Olivier Sorgho and Alban Kacher
Editing by David Goodman
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