Good weather in Argentina allowed soya harvesting to advance by 16.8 percentage points over the last seven days, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said in its weekly grains report on Thursday, with 55 percent of early-planted areas already bagged. The fastest pace of harvesting during the week was clocked in the north-central area of Cordoba province and parts of Buenos Aires, Entre Rios and Santa Fe, the report said.

The country's Pampas grains belt was pelted with extraordinarily hard rains earlier in the season, and floods bogged down early harvesting. But recent dry weather has limited crop losses and allowed collection efforts to resume. The government has estimated that 750,000 hectares of soyabeans and 250,000 hectares of corn, the country two main cash crops, were lost due to bad weather in the 2016/17 crop year.

The exchange kept its soya harvest estimate for the season unchanged at 56.5 million tonnes. "The national yield average is positioned at 3.44 tonnes per hectare," the report said. About 30.6 million tonnes of 2016/17 soya have been harvested so far, it added. Corn yields this season are at 8.85 tonnes per hectare, the report said, with 29 percent of planted area harvested so far. The exchange expects 2016/17 corn output of 37 million tonnes. Sowing of 2017/18 corn is set to start in September with soya planting expected to follow in October. Meteorologists say both crops should benefit from expected wet weather over the months ahead, with some risk of a new round of flooding.

Copyright Reuters, 2017