Russian grain growers were hindered by weather and export duties
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“Not the harvest that is in the fields, but the one that is in the bins.” Probably, our Ministry of Agriculture forgot this folk wisdom, secretly announcing to the whole world that Russia will collect a record 130 million tons of grain and will be able to export 50 million tons. As Minister Dmitry Patrushev recently said, there are risks that the domestic agro-industrial complex is unlikely to achieve such indicators this year. It’s the weather, of course…
Due to the cold spring, sowing was delayed in many regions. Today, due to the shifted deadlines, the harvesting of bread is going on with a delay. According to the agricultural department, as of August 4, 8 million tons of grain was harvested less than this level of last year. Significantly less.
Throughout the growing season, we have heard reports of victory about the good prospects for the upcoming harvest. Winter crops did not freeze, as last year, farmers are provided with everything necessary …
The question involuntarily arose: but if everything is so good, then why is there no data in the public domain? Why can we hear dosed information only from the Minister of Agriculture himself? After all, there were no secrets before!
Not everything was so good.
Winter crops really came out in excellent condition by spring. As a rule, after the winter we lose 6-7% of crops, sometimes even more, up to 10. And this year, only 3-4%.
A certain concern was caused by spring sowing. They have already begun to be sown, and foreign partners who joined the sanctions demanded a 100% prepayment for their supplies due to the volatility of the ruble, which was thrown from side to side.
No partial prepayment or divorced in time – not even for plant protection products. These companies did not work on an advance payment at all, they always gave a delay for a year. There are huge sums that our peasants do not have.
There are many cases when manufacturers refused to buy chemicals. For the reason that the cost of the final harvest will be lower than the amount they pay for plant protection products. They intended to fight weeds with the old grandfather method – choppers. It is clear that the yield will suffer, but the producers will be profitable.
Against the backdrop of these problems, none of the serious agricultural analysts expected a record 130 million tons of grain. We hoped, but no more.
Confused by the confusion on the acreage. According to reports from the regions, 18.4 million hectares were sown with winter crops. And the Ministry of Agriculture eventually reported about 19 million. Where did the additional 600,000 hectares come from? They must yield! They can, of course, not give it, but it will be necessary to explain the cause of death, failure to sprout, although the state of winter crops, as we have already said, was good, it is difficult to attribute it to nature.
Independent experts predict other, more realistic figures: 120-125 million tons, and this is subject to good weather.
The fat harvest (40.2 centners per hectare against last year’s 28.3) led to an increased load on imported agricultural machinery, it began to fail more often. And since, due to the imposed sanctions, spare parts and components from unfriendly countries have ceased to be supplied, hence the slowdown in the harvesting campaign.
However, it is not even a matter of reducing the gross harvest. For the domestic market, we will have enough and intercept grain. The quality of the harvest is of concern, it is expected to be worse than last year. There is a whole chain of cause and effect relationships. Lack of funds led to the fact that grain growers could not stock up on the necessary volumes of fertilizers and plant protection products, which have risen in price by 50–80% since the beginning of the year. Here we add the vagaries of the weather and failures in the supply of spare parts for agricultural units – also pretty expensive.
According to Igor Abakumov, Candidate of Economic Sciences, host of the Rural Hour program, all these reasons together led to a decrease in the sowing campaign’s manufacturability. Which you can’t write off on nature.
About 100 billion rubles were confiscated from the grain growers through a duty, the state promised to return them last autumn. So that the peasants can get ready for the spring sowing campaign: buy high-quality seeds, fertilizers, plant protection products.
But only 20% returned, the rest flew away in all directions – to support grain growers, milkmen, and other farmers. As a result, the grain growers did not have enough funds for fertilizers and herbicides. Which affects the quality of the crop. In some regions, the volume of food grains (for nutrition) is 50-70%.
No one knows how much we will eventually get food wheat, from which bread is baked, and how much we will send for export. Feed grain does not count, nobody in the world is interested in it.
Newspaper headline:
Cereals are attributed to the weather
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