MOSCOW: The current weather is not hampering Russia’s winter grain sowing or harvesting, but yields in this year’s harvest were lower than last year, Roman Nekrasov, department head at the agriculture ministry, said on Friday.

Earlier, Deputy Minister Andrei Razin said that Russia will sow winter grain on 20 million hectares - as planned, and the same as last year.

Nekrasov said that the average grain yield in this year’s harvest as of Oct. 10 was 2.76 tons per hectare compared to 3.1 tons last year, and the average yield of wheat stood at 2.98 tons per hectares compared to 3.32 tons in 2023.

Russia, the world’s top wheat exporter, slightly revised its official estimate for this year’s harvest to 130 million tons from 132 million tons previously despite bad weather hitting many grain-producing regions this year.

“It will be an outstanding result for our farmers,” Rasin told a panel discussion at the Golden Autumn exhibition in Moscow, the industry’s top annual event. He said farmers have harvested 122 million tons of grain in gross weight from 92% of all grain-seeded area including 85 million tons of wheat.

Nekrasov added that there were 3.7 million hectares of grain-seeded area still to harvest before the campaign is officially over. The Sovecon consultancy said on Sept. 25 that winter wheat sowing rates in Russia have fallen to an 11-year low due to drought in key producing regions, clouding the outlook for the 2025 harvest. Russia’s weather forecast agency said last week that conditions for winter crops in some key producing regions were “worse than usual” in October due to a lack of precipitation.