Story sourced from Thomson Reuters
By Pavel Polityuk
Lack of moisture in soil across Ukraine could affect the yield of the next year’s winter grain crops and reduce the harvest, according to a senior weather forecaster, as farms started the 2012 winter grain sowing.
“The situation is not critical but we have enough ground for concerns,” Tetyana Adamenko, the head of the agricultural department of Ukraine’s meteorological centre, told Reuters in an interview. Ukraine plans to sow 8.3 million hectares for the 2012 winter grain harvest compared with 8.1 million a year earlier. Ukraine sowed 6.6 million hectares for winter wheat and 1.26 million for winter barley for the 2011 harvest. According to data provided by the Agriculture Ministry, farms had sown 752,000 hectares for winter grains, including 655,000 hectares of winter wheat, as of 13 September. But Adamenko said many Ukrainian regions suffered from drought and farms were forced to sow in a dry land. “The situation with moisture is much worse than last year. And the outlook is negative taking into account that we see no rain in September,” she said. “The present situation is similar to that in 2005, when we had a serious drought.” Drought in late 2005 combined with record frosts in January and February killed about 30 per cent of Ukrainian winter grain crops with farmers boosting the areas sown for spring grains to offset the significant winter losses.