MOSCOW: Harsh frost did not have a significant impact on grain harvest volumes as Russia was able to reseed most of the affected farmland, Russian Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut said on Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.

Lut was cited as saying that her ministry had kept a forecast of 132 million metric tons for the grain harvest, of which 86 million metric tons were wheat, in 2024 but that it might be adjusted later. “In southern regions and central Russia, we have had very dry weather for the last month and a half. That is, first we had frosts, and then it was very dry.

And this situation, of course, can significantly adjust, in principle, our expectations”, she said. Russia’s state weather forecaster Hydrometcentre expects unfavourable conditions for crops due to hot weather in the south of European part of the country until the end of June.

Russian Ministry of Agriculture estimates crop losses from May frosts at about 1 million hectares, or 1.2% of the total sown area for the 2024 harvest, with another 700,000 hectares suffering from various degree of damages.

In early June, Moscow declared an emergency in 10 regions to facilitate insurance claims by farmers. Russia has almost completed the sowing campaign and started harvesting the new crop in the southern regions of the country.

This week, after an ongoing series of forecast cuts since April, Russia’s IKAR agricultural consultancy has raised its forecasts for wheat crop in 2024 by 0.5 million tons to 82 million metric tons after specification of production by regions.