Grain Prices Soar on Worries About Heat : Commodities: Analysts say it’s too early to predict whether the increases will affect food costs.

CHICAGO — Grain prices soared Monday on forecasts that crop-wilting heat may make a return visit to the nation’s Midwest after last week’s record-breaking heat wave.

On the Chicago Board of Trade, July soybean futures closed up 23.75 cents at $6.438 a bushel, July corn climbed 7.5 cents to $2.945 a bushel, and July wheat futures ended up 19.5 cents to $4.605 a bushel.

“This is all on a little disappointment with the weekend rains and the fact heat will return this week, maybe not as severe or widespread as was seen but it’s back,” said Mark Cermak, an analyst at O’Connor & Co.

“It’s all weather,” said grain market analyst Vic Lespinasse of Dean Witter Reynolds.

Analysts said it is too early to predict whether the soaring price of grains will affect the retail prices of breakfast cereals, flour and salad oil.

But they said continued dry weather in the nation’s grain belt will have some inflationary impact if crops are sharply reduced.

Weather experts said cooler air and scattered rain over the weekend eased last week’s intense hot spell in the Midwest but that hot, dry weather may return later this week, putting further stress on crops.

The searing heat added to fears that crops, already struggling after late seedings due to a cold, wet spring, were seriously harmed.

Fred Gesser, chief forecaster with Weather Express Inc., a private forecasting firm based in Omaha, said he expects temperatures to return to the mid-90s in parts of the Corn Belt in western Iowa and Nebraska by Thursday.

“Then the mid-90 to upper-90 degree temperatures will spread into the Ohio valley Thursday to Sunday, further stressing the corn and soybean crops,” he said.

Last week, the entire state of Iowa sizzled in 100-degree heat, and the hot weather stretched from northern Texas through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and parts of Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri.

Temperatures dipped below 90 in some areas by the weekend, snapping a six-day heat wave that had killed more than 200 people from Philadelphia to Kansas City, Mo.

Gesser said the heat will revisit areas that had the least beneficial rains, including Nebraska, southwestern Iowa, northern Illinois and southern Indiana.

Grain traders were betting that last week’s hot weather had hurt some crops and that weekend rainfall in the Midwest was less than needed to halt deterioration of some crops.

“We just didn’t replenish soil moisture levels enough,” said Cermak at O’Connor & Co.

Wheat prices were also driven by a government forecast that the nation’s wheat stockpile will be the smallest in 22 years--428 million bushels--before next year’s harvest. Corn and soybean stockpiles are also expected to shrink.

Retail food prices are not expected to be affected, at least for now, by fluctuations in grain prices.