Winter crop harvest begins in Black Sea with slight lag to last year

The 2020/21 Black Sea winter crop harvest has started with a slight lag after low temperatures and wet weather in May and the beginning of June delayed the final stages of crop maturation, government data showed Friday.

Ukraine has harvested the first 47,780 ha of this year’s crop, according to an update from the agriculture ministry.

Equivalent to 124,950 mt, there is a notable lag to this time last year when 1.2 million mt had already been harvested from 380,000 ha.

Barley made up the bulk of the harvest to date with 118,030 mt gathered at an average yield of 3 mt/ha, while around 4,000 mt of wheat has been harvested with a yield of 2.85 mt/ha.

Ukraine is expected to produce 26.5 million mt of wheat and 9.4 million mt of barley this year, according to USDA estimates.

In Russia’s Stavropol region – a key area in the south of the country where production typically heads for export – the winter crop harvest has reached 9% complete, according to data from the local agriculture ministry office published Friday.

Equivalent to 178,900 ha, a total of 433,100 mt of crops have now been gathered, although the ministry gave no breakdown by crop.

The average yield for all winter crops was 2.42 mt/ha, compared to 3.29 mt/ha for the same period in 2019.

No official data for the total Russian harvest was available at the time of publishing.

Russian wheat production is forecast at 77 million mt and barley at 17.3 million mt by the USDA.