The level of bets by speculators on farm commodity futures has hit a record high - even before last week's announcement of a $600bn injection into the US economy prompted a fresh spate of buying.

The amount of crop covered by speculators' investments has hit a record top, as measured by their interest in open farm commodity futures and options on US agricultural futures markets.

And most of this exposure was to further rises in crop prices, with speculators' net long position – that is, subtracting short bets, which profit when values fall - accounting for 103m tonnes of crop, according to Australian & New Zealand Bank calculations.

'New record expected'

The figure, which beat by 3% the previous high in September, was based on analysis of weekly position data released by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and covered the period up to November 2.

And ANZ said that the net long position was set for further gains when the CFTC announces its next data, on Friday, to judge by the reaction of crop markets to America's second bout of quantitative easing – or QE2 – under which the country's central bank buys Treasury bonds, so depressing interest rates and boosting economic activity.

"With confirmation of QE2, outside market trends have been incredibly favourable for ag markets," ANZ said, estimating that its farm commodity index added 5% last week.

"Gold and US equities were up 3% over the last week, while the US dollar was 1% weaker.

"For next week's CFTC report, a new record long is expected for the spec position."

Soybean appeal

Soybeans attracted particular new long bets by speculators over the past week, taking the total position in Chicago contracts to a record 166,000.

Indeed, Brian Henry, at Benson Quinn Commodities, warned over the "extremely bullish" positions being taken in the oilseed.

While taking long positions "and closing your eyes has worked very well for the last couple of weeks... we may be getting to the point of having too many people on one side of the boat", he said.

In wheat, speculators cut by 15,000 lots their net short exposure to Chicago wheat, and added 4,000 lots to net longs in Kansas wheat. Both exchanges trade winter wheat varieties, for which concerns have grown for newly-planted crop in the US following a dry spell.

However, speculators cut net long positions in cattle and hogs, for which some analysts fear prices will suffer because of higher feed prices. 

ANZ counts as speculators the "managed money", "other" and "non-reportable positions" segments of the CFTC reports.