Russian wheat crop already at 22 million mt, yields improving

The Russian wheat harvest advanced another eight percentage points during the week to July 18, with 22 million mt already in the bins and yield continuing to increase, official government data showed Tuesday.

Russian farmers had already harvested an area of 5.1 million hectares by July 18, which accounts for 17.4% of the area planted.

The yield continued to improve slightly through the week to 4.32 mt/ha, which is also 25% higher compared to last year’s result.  

At the same time, trade sources continued to report bigger amounts of lower grades compared to last year, when the wheat harvested generally had a high protein content.

Progress in the barley harvest was not that significant at only 2.3 percentage points, moving the total harvested to 10.5% of the plan, or for 3.7 million mt.

Barley yields meanwhile declined during the period by 7% to 4.40 mt/ha, which is still around 14.6% above last year’s result at the same stage.

The rapeseed harvest progress was also slow, with only 2.2 percentage points advancement through the week to 10.1% of the plan completed.

That accounts to 572,700 mt harvested from 226,200 hectares, while the yield also marginally dropped to 2.53 mt/ha, which is 1% higher than the yield reported at the same stage in 2021.