Coming back to Crop Tour HQ two weeks ago and it's been flat out busy, busy, busy.The Black Sea Crop Tour reports are now written and available to purchase for a modest £350 for the two.
They include the only independent crop yield forecasts for Russia and Ukraine and you also get the rest of the season's crop tours thrown in for that.
Drop me a line if you want to secure copies, I'll email them out by return and follow up with an invoice when I get a minute - if you're currently waiting for an invoice, don't worry, it will be coming just once I get through this mountain of work.
Latest crop reports are indicating it's hot and dry in parts of Ukraine which considering it's the middle of summer really isn't that big a news story.
Some analysts are calling a lower Ukraine barley crop citing hot dry weather which is incorrect; the lower barley crop is down to fewer hectares and late spring cold damage, something we reported on following our tours in March and May.
(I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can't beat getting out and about across the cropping regions to understand what's really going on out there, there's only so much you can tell about a crop from Google.)
As of June 15, Russian spring sowing stood at 51.1 million hectares or 97% of the forecast including 13.1mha of spring wheat, 7.5mha of spring barley, around 3.0mha of corn, 7.5mha of sunflowers and 2.4mha of soybean, all of which are slightly different to predictions of three weeks ago so I will be tweaking crop yield forecasts accordingly.
I’d update the figures for Ukraine but the Ministry website is next to useless today and I really don't have time to sit watching a web page not load for five minutes, actually, it's been pants for some time now, but I'll get around to updating Ukraine soon.
Back to the grindstone, laters.