The wheat harvest in Germany is expected to buck the European trend by falling this year, farm co-operatives have said, noting a fall in sowings of feed grain and a blow from wet weather.

The German winter wheat harvest, essentially all the crop, will fall by 1.3% to 24.59m tonnes, the DRV farm co-operatives association said.

The slide, which goes against the forecast trend of a small rise in EU wheat production, reflects in part poor weather in Germany, Europe's second-ranked wheat producer.

While crops had sufficient snow cover to avoid significant winterkill, yields may suffer after wet conditions prevented farmers from making fertilizer applications.

'No record harvest' 

Furthermore, many grain growers have spurned sowing feed crops to planting better-quality crops which often produce lower yields. The decline reflects a change in the EU regime of intervention buying, which is withdrawing support from all but a core of crops.

The overall grain harvest will drop by some 8% to 46m tonnes.

"The DRV currently expects no record harvest, but good average yields," the co-operative said.

Italian imports 

Separately, Italy, one of Europe's biggest grain buyers, said that its imports of cereals rose 6.2% to 10.78m tonnes last year.

The rise was led by a 28% jump to 2.14m tonnes in foreign purchases of durum, the type of wheat used in making pasta, Anacer, the Italian cereals body, said.

Soft wheat imports rose by 13% to 4.20m tonnes.

Anacer gave no explanation for the increases. The data follows a steep drop in January in official forecasts for Italy's corn and wheat production.