According to the Canadian agriculture ministry, the country’s stocks of barley at 2018 year-end stood at 4.9m tonnes, which is down more than 18% on the previous year.

Canadian wheat stocks were unchanged at just over 23m tonnes, while stocks of oilseed rape were a record 14.6m tonnes.

Brazil exported close to 102,500t of beef in the first month of 2019, which was slightly higher than the 99,000t shipped in January 2018.

This is the highest level of Brazilian beef exports for January in six years, when beef shipments were close to 105,000t in 2014.

Australia’s national beef herd is set to fall to its lowest level in over 20 years due to the ongoing severe drought hitting the country.

Meat and Livestock Australia has forecast the Australian beef herd to drop 3% in 2019 to 7.6m head, with total beef production forecast to fall 4% to 2.2m tonnes.

UK milk production for December 2018 stood at 1.2bn litres, which was a 2% increase on milk production in the same month a year previous.

This saw UK milk production for all of 2018 come in at 14.7bn litres, which was flat compared with 2017.