East Anglia's harvest is set to ramp up a gear in the coming days as farmers take advantage of the hot, dry weather to gather their cereal crops – with hopes that less favourable conditions elsewhere could boost their prices.

With the winter barley and oilseed rape harvest almost complete, the attention has shifted to spring barley and wheat crops, where yields are also expected to be below average. But while the wet June prompted quality problems for winter barley, grain traders said the first deliveries of spring barley and wheat have been of a higher standard, which could put East Anglia's growers in a strong marketing position.

Andrew Dewing, of Aylsham-based merchants Dewing Grain, said: 'Yields are down across the board, but the spring barley and the wheat are of good quality and very useable.

'Our spring barley is looking bold. There have been some European problems with malting barley – the French got rain through June and lots of their barley was written off with rain damage, and there are some higher nitrogen levels around in Denmark and the Baltics. So there is a lot less malting barley around, and the market looks exciting at the moment. If a problem comes in Northern England and Scotland then the price will go up quite a lot.'

'The wheat is lovely quality. Because of the wet June there has been some disease issues in the crop, but the last four or five weeks of fantastic sunny weather has optimised what the potential is.

'If last year's bumper harvest was 10pc up on the mean, then this year the yield is probably 5pc down on the mean, so its a 15pc swing downwards. It might be a smaller crop than some people expected but it is good quality and the major benefit of this harvest is it is dry.

'There are no challenges or costs in drying it and there is a heatwave coming this week, so there's no squabbling about wet grain. You can just get it straight off the field. Hopefully it will all be done by the Aylsham Show (on Bank Holiday Monday).'

Mr Dewing said although yields were below average, the weak pound was helping the prospects of finding export markets.

'Our quality is such that there is a chance we could see UK wheat finding a new export market in France, where the crop is 10-12m tonnes lower and it is not good quality,' he said. 'Here, our prices have improved. We had a price increase of £7 per tonne this week, and that's down to yield.'