Chad Smith, NAFB News Service

Argentina received much-welcomed rains in areas like La Pampa and many Buenos Aires locations into central Cordoba, San Luis, and southern Santa Fe late last week. Moisture totals varied from .2 to .88 inches of rain, with local totals of one inch to more than three inches in southern Santa Fe and southeastern Cordoba. The moisture combined with the rain falling earlier last week, as well as the rain expected over the past weekend, should help South American crops coast into this week’s dry and warmer weather without a lot of concern over drought stress. Timely rain is going to be extremely important over the last week of January and into early February. However, current conditions are improving. A Bower Trading report says Brazil’s rainfall has been erratic recently, but enough rain is falling in the most important production areas. Two days’ worth of scattered showers and thunderstorms fell in the northern and western parts of the country’s crop-growing regions. The weather outlook in Brazil shows rain ahead for most of the key grain, oilseed, and cotton areas in South America. Drier weather is forecast in certain areas, but it will have a bigger impact on unirrigated coffee, cocoa, and small sugarcane fields, more so than it will on the coarse grains and oilseeds.