Russian Grain Harvest Could Be 100 MMT
24/08/11 -- It's intrigued me for a while that the figures coming out of Russia don't seem to stack up. The latest ones say that they've harvested 50% of the planted area (22 million ha) and produced 57.9 MMT of grain, yet official final output estimates are "only" 85-90 MMT.
Now I fully understand that the harvest might be pretty well done in the higher production areas and is only just beginning in Siberia and the Urals, where yields are generally significantly lower, but things still don't seem to look right.
Although yields from region to region are highly variable, on a national level the current average is 2.64 MT/ha, an increase of 27.5% on last year. It is clear however that it is unlikely that somewhere like Siberia isn't going to achieve production of those sort of levels, where 1.5 MT/ha is more typical.
Even so, based on regional yields so far there seems to be plenty of potential for a grain crop of around 100 MMT by my calculations:
Region |
Harvested |
% Of Planted Area |
Total Area |
Yield |
Final |
| Southern | 5.9 |
83 |
7.1 |
3.25 |
23.1 |
| N Caucasus | 2.3 |
85 |
2.7 |
3.71 |
10.0 |
| Central | 5.5 |
74 |
7.4 |
2.44 |
18.1 |
| Volga | 7.0 |
57 |
12.3 |
2.06 |
25.3 |
| Siberia | 0.7 |
7 |
9.6 |
1.59 |
15.3 |
| Far East | 0.2 |
53 |
0.3 |
2.04 |
0.6 |
| Urals | 0.2 |
4 |
3.8 |
2.36 |
9.0 |
| Total | 21.8 |
43.2 |
101.4 |
Area is in million hectares, yields are MT/ha and production in MMT. Figures are rounded but tie in pretty accurately with reports of 22 million ha harvested so far out of a total planted area of 44 million ha.
Final production figures are based on the harvested yield so far multiplied by the outstanding uncut area. The two largest unharvested areas are Siberia and the Urals. Even if we were to suppose that final yields in the Urals would be significantly less than the early average of 2.36 MT/ha, say the 1.59 MT/ha coming out of Siberia, then we'd still have a final production numbers of 98.4 MMT.
