From February 15, Russia is introducing temporary restrictions on corn
and soybeans from the United States after finding contamination including dry
rot in corn and weed seeds in soybeans.
Russia’s food and safety watchdog said they found 64 cases of bacterial
contamination in US soybeans including a bacteria which does not exist in
Russia.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any meaningful plant pathology but
isn’t it conceivable that if you look at any grain consignment from another region you will find bacteria which is not present in your country?
Isn’t that what makes cheese regional?
Isn’t that what makes cheese regional?
The Minister of Agriculture says that Russia plans to replace American
soybeans with soybeans from Latin American countries.
A cargo train recently completed China-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran
railway covering 7,908km over nine days.
The route requires two weeks to cover, which is estimated to be around
twice as fast as the sea route.
Kazakhstan hopes to use the new railway to up grain exports to Iran and
presumably back the other way to China once China starts buying wheat again.
In Ukraine the Minister of Agriculture reported that 2015 investments in agriculture totalled $1 billion and is planned to
reach $2 billion in 2016.
Ukraine’s Deputy Minister for European integration said this week that agricultural
and high technologies (IT) have the greatest prospects for development saying
that many farms in Ukraine are already using technology to optimise costs by reducing
fertiliser and fuel.
An oversimplification perhaps but you get the general idea and to be
fair the large scale nature of Ukraine agriculture does lend itself to remote
sensing, variable application, yield mapping and the like.
Plus I have to say Ukraine Wi-Fi and internet access is
brilliant, superfast, free and you don’t need to write your life story to
access a cloud that doesn’t work.
Meanwhile here at Crop Tour Towers we are gearing up for our 2016 Crop Tours and it’s
already looking to be an interesting season.
South and east Ukraine had a difficult start with autumn dryness delaying
germination and a pretty rough winter since with snow melting and leaving crops
exposed. Large parts of Russia are also
snow free and unseasonably warm weather is currently softening crops making
them vulnerable to any drop in temperature.
Plus where we do have snow we are finding ice encased crops which
will start to suffer within the next week.
This year we are planning to run up to ten separate crop tours at key times
across Russia and Ukraine kicking off with a post-winter assessment in late
March shortly followed up with an assessment of the spring crops post planting.
We will be offering an annual subscription service which gets you
access to all the reports through the entire season plus intermittent updates
of interest as and when they occur and we will also continue to offer access to
individual reports.
As always your support will be greatly appreciated, watch this space for details.
Finally, this weeks “pregnant panda” story goes to Ukraine; while
researching the internet using the terms “Ukraine” and “milk” I stumbled across
this.
A fed-up woman who had endured a 14-hour business meeting said
'I can't take no more, I want to go home, declare a break!' before spraying her
colleagues with breast milk when they ignored her request.
Have a good weekend.