Wheat production in Russia is expected to drop to 67.4 million tonnes this year, down 21.5 percent from 2017's record harvest after adverse weather affected both winter and spring crops, French consultancy Agritel said on Thursday. Other forecasters have been scaling back their expectations for the wheat harvest in Russia, the world's biggest exporter of the cereal, due to weather concerns, contributing to a run-up in international prices last month.
Agritel's estimate was below the 68.50 million tonnes projected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a world crop report on June 12, a projection that fuelled gains in wheat futures, before prices retreated in the past week. Agritel's forecast, which followed a crop tour it conducted in southern Russia last week, would nonetheless be 1.3 percent above the average volume of the past five years, it said.
"Crop conditions are heterogeneous in the south," Pierre Begoc, Agritel's international director, told the Thomson Reuters online Global Ags forum, stressing the impact of dry, hot weather. "But again, 2017 was an exception," he said. "It (the forecast production) is still the third-best Russian wheat crop since Mr Putin's first election as president in 2000."
The consultancy's production outlook was based on an estimated average yield of 2.61 tonnes per hectare (t/ha), down from 3.10 t/ha last year, and an area of 25.83 million hectares. For winter wheat, production was forecast to decline to 50 million tonnes, down about 19 percent from last year.
The sweltering conditions in the south may lead to some quality problems for wheat and also barley, with the risk of poor specific weights, a key measure of grain quality, he said. But generally wheat quality was expected to be decent, with the dry spring reducing disease pressure, he added.
For later-developing spring wheat, it projected production would drop about 28 percent to 17.3 million tonnes, saying planting delays had led it to estimate a decrease in the crop area to 11.3 million hectares from 12.7 million last year. Cold, wet conditions in more northerly regions have hampered sowing and early growth of spring wheat, contributing to downward revisions by some forecasters.
Agritel has provisionally applied a 10-year average of 1.53 t/ha as the 2018 spring wheat yield, down from 1.89 t/ha last year. But Begoc said soil moisture from the heavy rain could boost potential if weather turned brighter in the coming weeks.
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