UK: OSR Crop Not Looking Good
Continuous cold wet weather and low soil temperatures have left oilseed rapes crops damaged by pigeons looking very poor and backward.
This season's crop is also blighted by the highest levels of light leaf spot since 1995 according to DEFRA.
They say that nationally infection levels are running around three times normal.
As well as widespread pigeon damage there are reports too of crops being been badly defoliated after the recent snows melted.
OSR growth seen coming from Eastern Europe
Farmer's Guardian--WHILE experts at Syngenta do not expect the acreage of oilseed rape grown in western Europe to increase in the next five years, they predict some growth in eastern European countries.
In Europe, 6.5 million hectares of rapeseed is grown, accounting for 35 per cent of the world’s production.
Grzegorz Szreder, Syngenta’s rapeseed product manager for Europe, said: “The market will remain stable in western Europe in terms of acreage, and the main growth will come from come from newer EU members in the east such as Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.”
He expected the area of OSR grown in these east European countries to grow by one million hectares between 2008 and 2013 with much of this growth coming from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia.
The main drivers for growth will be the commodity price, growing demand for rapeseed, increased focus on biofuels and increases in yields.
Mr Szreder said that, in some of these countries, oilseed rape had replaced the more traditional crop of sugar beet.
