A cold snap that hit Europe early this month after a unusually mild winter has caused damage to grain crops in the eastern part of the bloc and Ukraine where the fall in temperatures was the steepest, crop monitoring unit MARS said on Monday.
Extremely mild weather in December delayed the hardening of winter crops leaving crops fragile to a cold spell which hit at the end of last month and in the first week of January, it said.
MARS did not give damage estimates nor yield forecast for this year's crops. These will be released in March.
"The sharp temperature drop combined with shallow (1-5 centimeters) snow cover, primarily in Poland and western Ukraine, caused some frost injuries as simulated by the model," the unit said in a report.
Temperatures fell as low as -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 Farenheit) in this region, MARS said.
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