Tuesday, 22 July 2014

Ukraine conflict harvest update

Ukraine has harvested 5.14mha or 52% of the early harvest producing 16.11mmt with an average yield of 3.14m/ha, slightly up on the last report (3.04mt/ha) and the same date last year (2.92mt/ha).

With settled weather forecast through the rest of the week, harvest should carry on unhindered obviously apart from the areas of conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk.

In a purely academic exercise carried out from the safety of my desk to try and quantify the possible impact of the conflict on the grain harvest, Donetsk and Luhansk contain about 9% or 3.1mha of Ukraine’s arable land.

Making the assumption that 75% of the land is cropped; 30% of the cropped land is cereals; 50% of that is in the conflict zone and unreachable; I reckon that’s about 351kha of small grain cereals at risk of not being harvested or about 4% of the national crop or at current yield figures 1.1mmt.

That’s something to think about.

For the record then, current bunker weight yields are running as follows; wheat 3.38mt/ha; barley 2.77mt/ha; rye 2.24mt/ha; oats 1.71mt/ha; peas 2.20mt/ha; oilseed rape 2.16mt/ha.