Oct 3 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures settled nearly unchanged on Tuesday after hitting a six-week low earlier in the session amid expectations of a bountiful crop of the natural fiber in the United States.
Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.05 cent, or 0.07 percent, at 67.52 cents per lb. The contract touched a low of 67.40 cents per lb during the session, the weakest since Aug. 22.
"It is the advent of harvest and as the pipeline gets filled, prices will sink lower," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton brokers Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. "We have the largest crop in a decade but it is being delayed because of weather situations in different locations in the country."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projected 21.76 million bales of U.S. cotton output for the 2017-2018 crop year in its World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report released in September. That was higher than the 20.55 million bales of production estimated in the previous month.
The USDA's weekly crop progress report on Monday showed about 17 percent of the cotton crop in the United States had been harvested by the week ended Oct. 1 as against a five-year average of 13 percent for the corresponding period. About 57 percent of the crop was in good or excellent condition compared with 60 percent in the prior week, Monday's report said. "With the crop quickly maturing and with harvest under way, the weight of condition rating and indices will likely carry less weight with traders as October progresses," Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity said in a note on Monday.
Total futures market volume fell by 3,308 to 18,744 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 1,761 to 231,203 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Oct. 2 totaled 3,827 480-lb bales, down from 3,860 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.01 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index , which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.01 percent.
(Reporting by Eileen Soreng in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Cooney)