Announcing the company's harvest 2010 Oilseed Rape Poll result, Jonathan Lane, Gleadell's trading manager said: “From late spring the outlook for EU rapeseed prices was favourable and, whilst we thought it prudent to sell a small percentage into the rising market, we generally tried to wait as long as possible to give our pool members the best chance of achieving as good a price as possible. However, the bulk of the rally came in mid-August, after the date when most of our growers needed their crops to be off the farm. Given this, our return of £260.68 before bonuses and after commission is an excellent result.”

Commenting on conditions across Northern Europe during harvest, Mr Lane noted that inclement weather combined with spring droughts in the East, severely affected European rapeseed production.

“The harvest across Europe was a stop-start affair with crops generally slow to mature and, in many cases, farmers were cutting wheat before rapeseed. UK crops were very variable with some bumper yields mixed with some absolute disasters. But our best estimates would suggest that we have a crop of 2.1mln/t giving the UK the opportunity to sell 300-350thd/t for export.”

Turning to mainland Europe, Mr Lane noted that crops were generally disappointing. In France, yields were average at best but it was Germany that really suffered. Rain affected the completion of harvest by some 14 days and output was certainly down on expectations with Toepfer International pegging production at 5.5mln/t. However, the real disasters were in the Balkans and Eastern Europe where exceedingly heavy rain in July decimated the crops and cut the pre-harvest forecasts in half. As a result, we are forecasting EU-27 production to fall below 20mln/t and the import requirements to move towards 2mln/t!

“Given this situation, the production in the Black Sea region is exceptionally important to the EU crushers - the EU needs every ounce that they can produce. But in order to do this, EU crushers must compete against Pakistan and the Far East who also want to buy it.

“However, even with this seed, there still isn’t enough and we will ultimately need Australian seed too. Given the good crush margins, the EU crushers can afford to pay more for the seed - and will have to if they want to continue processing. With the current differentials, the market has some work to do to - either ration demand - or secure fresh supplies of third country seed,” he concluded.