Noble Group said that its Brazilian mills were to extend their crushing season to make up for a poor start, when their rain-hit performance fuelled a 69% slump in the group's farm-sector profits.

The coal-to-oilseeds trader said that its agriculture division had bucked a trend of improving performance in other activities, seeing profits for the April-to-June quarter slump to $51.1m.

"Our agriculture segment was impacted by high volatility and difficult weather conditions," the Singapore-based group said.

The group's recently-acquired Brazilian sugar operations performed particularly badly thanks to the "wet weather" in the key Centre South region over the quarter which forced many processors to run mills at lower operating rates.

Bunge, a rival to Noble in agricultural trading, reported that its Brazil Centre South sugar operations ran in the red during the quarter.

Extended crushing

However, Noble flagged a "robust" sugar crop despite the poor start, reflecting ideas from many commentators that the rains, while slowing harvesting short term, will boost yields further ahead.

Indeed, Noble said its mills were "positioned to compensate for the processing lost in the reporting period and expect to be running into December".

The comments follow data from Brazilian cane industry group Unica last week showing a continued recovery in the Centre South crush, as weather turned drier last month.

The region's cane yield has improved to 78.5 tonnes of cane per hectare, up nearly 14% year on year, according to the Centre for Cane Technology (CTC).

Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, Unica's president and technical director, said: "If the tendency of improving yields continues in the coming months, it's likely the quantity of cane to crush this crop will surpass the 509m tonnes estimated in April."

'Challenging quarter'

Noble added that its grains and oilseeds business "experienced a challenging quarter" too in the April-to-June period, undermined by "poor crush conditions" in China.

Soybean processing margins spent much of the quarter in the red, and fell below a negative 250 remninbi per tonne at one point.

However, the group forecast that, with prospects weak for US crops, its operations in South America, set for large 2012-13 harvests, would "take some advantage of the tight supply in grains".

Its soft commodity operations outside sugar delivered "solid contributions" in the latest quarter.

'Generally pleasing'

Group revenues rose 23% to $24.2bn,  falling just below forecasts of $24.5bn, with earnings rising 39% to $194.8m, an improvement fuelled by more favourable tax treatment.

Yusuf Alireza, Noble's recently-installed chief executive, said that the results "were generally pleasing given that the market environment has been unusually uncertain for the entire period".

The data were released after the close of Singapore's stock exchange on Monday, where Noble share closed down 2.2% at Sing$1.115.