Cotton futures jumped to a record on concern that supplies will trail demand as adverse weather damages crops in China, the world’s biggest consumer.
A three-day cold spell, forecast to last through today, may hurt plants, the China Meteorological Center said yesterday. Stockpiles in the U.S., the world’s biggest shipper, will drop 8.5 percent in the year that began Aug. 1 from a year earlier, the Department of Agriculture said on Oct. 8. Cotton futures have surged 71 percent this year.
“The fundamentals remain bullish,” said Keith Brown, the president of Keith Brown & Co., a brokerage in Moultrie, Georgia.
Cotton for December delivery rose 4.88 cents, or 3.9 percent, to settle at $1.2959 a pound at 2:40 p.m. on ICE Futures U.S. in New York. Earlier, the commodity touched $1.305, the highest ever.
Prices yesterday jumped the most allowed by ICE for the second straight day after hail last week pounded fields in Texas, the top grower in the U.S.
The portion of the cotton belt that was hit the hardest was near Plains and stretched as far south as the town of Loop, Texas AgriLife, a unit of Texas A&M University in College Station, said today in a report. The storm hit an area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) long and as much as 20 miles wide, according to the report.
As much as 20 percent of the fiber was already harvested in the area, Randy Boman a cotton agronomist in Lubbock, Texas, said in the report.
“A lot of fields were completely stripped by the hail,” Boman said. “Other fields still had leaves because they hadn’t had harvest aids applied, and those might not have been as badly damaged.”