EU crops yield reduced amid ongoing drought conditions: MARS

The EU’s crop monitoring service has reduced its expectations for the bloc's 2022 winter crop for a third consecutive month, amid drier-than-usual conditions across large parts of the continent.

The June report published by Monitoring Agriculture Resources (MARS) showed that hot temperatures continued to have an adverse impact across the regions key growing regions. 

At an EU level, 2022 yield forecasts for soft wheat, durum wheat and winter barley are now sitting just below the 5-year average.

The forecast for rapeseed, corn, and sunflowers and were also reduced but remain largely at the historical average, while the outlook for soybean and spring barley output remains essentially unchanged.

The strongest downward revision, by almost 5% at EU level, was for durum wheat in southern Europe.

Soft wheat was revised downward in 13 of the 25 EU wheat producing countries, most importantly in Hungary, Romania, Poland and France.

Drought conditions in the southern and western parts of France during May reduced the yield outlook of winter cereals.

The winter cereal development accelerated in May due to the warm temperatures, and the heading stage is now finished across the country.

According to the report, high temperatures combined with the significant water deficit were strongly unfavourable and primarily affected the southern and western regions where the crops were most advanced.

Precipitation in early June arrived too late to preserve the yield potential in these regions.

Along with this, in the Baltic Sea region, crops were negatively affected by persistently colder-than-usual weather.