Russia's 2018 crop of winter wheat and rye is expected to fall around 10 percent from last year due to dry weather, state weather forecaster Hydrometcentre told Reuters on Thursday. Russia, one of the world's largest grain exporters, harvested 64.3 million tonnes of winter wheat and rye in 2017, Anna Strashnaya, senior researcher at Hydrometcentre, said. The country produced a record crop of 135.4 million tonnes of spring and winter grains of all types in 2017. It will have large stocks left of that record crop once the new 2018/19 marketing year starts on July 1.
These carry-over stocks will help Moscow to keep exports high even if its 2018 grain crop is lower than in 2017, the agriculture ministry has said. Russia's grain stocks at farms and procurement and processing companies, excluding small farms, were up 16 percent from a year earlier at 33 million tonnes as of April 1, according to state statistics service Rosstat.
Dry weather damaged winter grains in part of Russia's southern regions such as Rostov, Volgograd and Krasnodar, Strashnaya said, adding that rapid change of temperature also affected sowings in some areas of the country. Dry weather also persists in Crimea but rains are expected in the next few days, she added. Crimea is the peninsula annexed by Moscow from Kiev in 2014.
Russian farmers sowed winter grains for the 2018 crop on 17.1 million hectares, down from 17.3 million hectares a year earlier. They are now busy with spring grains sowing with 75 percent of the planned area, or 23 million hectares, already completed compared with 28 million hectares around the same date a year ago, according to the agriculture ministry.
Hydrometcentre will have detailed data about the condition of spring grains in about a month. However, it is already clear that the cold weather has delayed sowing of spring grains in Western Siberia, Strashnaya said.
Comments
Comments are closed.