Brazil's next soybean crop, the world's second-largest, is facing a challenge before farmers have even planted the first seeds in the ground.
That's because weather forecasts for the next few weeks show there may not be enough rain to restore moisture levels in areas that struggled with drought in the previous season. Farmers may delay planting rather than risk lower yields by sowing the next crop this month.
Aprosoja, a growers group in Mato Grosso state, said it's advising them to wait until conditions are right, and that they must be more cautious compared with a year ago.
"After losing soybeans to drought in the past season, this is a decisive year," Endrigo Dalcin, the head of Aprosoja, said.
Timing is critical for Brazilian farmers who cultivate two crops in a year -- soybeans in the Southern Hemisphere summer and corn in the winter. Getting it wrong can be costly, a fact demonstrated by the Mato Grosso farmers who planted soybeans too early last year and had to replant the crop.
The recurrence of similar problems this year could threaten supplies from Brazil, the world's top soybean exporter. The country's output in the 2016-17 season may rise to a record 102 million metric tons, according to the average estimate of five analysts polled by Bloomberg. But the planted area is seen expanding by the least in a decade, the same survey shows, amid tighter farming margins, a credit shortage and higher prices for corn, which some farmers are switching to at the expense of soybeans this time around.
Meteorologists such as Alexandre Nascimento at Climatempo don't see conditions this season being quite as bad as they were a year ago. Brazil's soybean growers lost as much as 6.6 million tons of production last season due to drought, with the 2015-16 crop falling 0.8 percent and ending up trailing initial estimates, according to the state-owned crop-forecasting agency Conab.
Information for this article was contributed by Gerson Freitas Jr. of Bloomberg News.
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