Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures ended lower on Friday, with the most-active contract CBOT:ZW1! ending lower for the fifth session in six, as traders continued liquidating their positions and concerns grew over supply pressures from Northern Hemisphere harvests, market analysts said.
CBOT's July SRW wheat (WN26) contract ended down 12-3/4 cents at $5.78-1/2 a bushel, while the most-active September wheat (WU26) settled 11-3/4 cents lower at $5.89-3/4 a bushel.
K.C. September hard red winter wheat (KWU26) settled 11 cents lower at $6.19-1/2 per bushel, and the Minneapolis September spring wheat (MWEU26) ended down 9-3/4 cents at $6.05-1/4 a bushel.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday is expected to report June 1 wheat stocks were up 9.2% from a year earlier, a Reuters poll of analysts showed.
The National Weather Service is forecasting that temperatures could reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend as far north as the upper Midwest and as far east as the Carolinas. Hotter-than-normal weather is expected from the Plains to the Atlantic Coast through July 4.
Drier and hotter weather next week should help speed up crop maturity and the harvesting pace in parts of the U.S. wheat belt, one analyst said.
In France, soft wheat crop conditions worsened and maize conditions set an eight-year low last week due to an extreme heatwave.