Dry soil could hit the sowing of winter grain in Ukraine, analyst UkrAgroConsult said on Monday. Winter wheat accounts for 95 percent of Ukraine's overall wheat output, and the winter crop is also a significant part of the barley harvest.
The consultancy said in a statement the average daily temperature was up to 6 degrees Celsius higher than the norm, and that had created poor conditions for preparing the soil for winter sowing.
Sufficient moisture in the upper layer of the soil was observed only in parts of Ukraine's northern, western and central regions, it said.
Ukraine's winter wheat harvest is highly dependent on moisture content in the soil during the autumn sowing, air temperatures in winter and favourable weather in spring.
A senior Ukrainian agriculture official said last month that farmers were likely to increase the area sown for winter grains for 2016/2017 to 7.3 million hectares from 7 million last year.
Poor weather last autumn forced farmers to reduce the area under winter grains. The area under winter wheat could be up to 6.5 million hectares for the 2016/17 season, he added.
UkrAgroConsult said that although the optimum sowing time for winter grains only began on September 10, farmers had already started winter grain sowing, which could lead to a too rapid development of the crops in the case of a warm autumn.
More than a half of Ukrainian regions have already started winter grain sowing, according to Ukraine's agriculture ministry, seeding 284,000 hectares of winter wheat or around 5 percent of the expected area.
Farms sowed 591,000 hectares of winter grains at the same date in 2015.
Farmers also sowed 625,000 hectares of winter rape or 86 percent of the planned area. Ukraine has completed the 2016 wheat harvest, threshing around 26 million tonnes of wheat.
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