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Volga Baikal AGRO NEWS Update on the Weather Situation !!!
In 2021, the drought can become one of the top stressors for the agricultural industry.
This year was not easy for many agricultural entreprises of the southern regions, Siberia and the Urals. Local droughts caused damage to crops of various agricultural crops and sometimes in neighboring areas the situation could be radically different: one farm collected 100 centners / ha of corn, while the other one harvested it only for straw. In this regard, it is rather difficult to say exactly what the losses were. The farmers complain about the decrease in the yield of grain and sunflower, the enterprises of the Southern Federal District were greatly let down by sugar beet. Livestock breeders from different regions also reported problems with feed procurement. Although, despite such troubles, the country will still harvest the second after the record wheat harvest, the gross corn harvest will also be above average.
But the winter sowing, which promised to be a record one, is under threat due to a lack of moisture, again in the south and in the Central Black Earth Region. According to the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), in the south of the Central and Volga Federal Districts, in the South and North Caucasian Federal Districts, the values of the vegetation index of agricultural crops are much lower than the average annual values. Due to the lack of moisture and in the event of a further absence of precipitation, winter crops here can experience problems in development, – this is an opinion of representatives of the Institute.
Alexander Korbut, Vice President of the Russian Grain Union, during the October Agroinvestor conference “Russian Meat & Feed Industry”, expressed his opinion that Russia is likely to come to a 10-12-year cycle of global droughts that affect most grain-producing regions. The last time a large-scale drought in Russia was in 2012, when grain production dropped to less than 71 million tons, and wheat did not exceed 38 million tons. Before that, in 2010 and 2011, local droughts occurred throughout the country.
Whether this situation will repeat itself or whether the experts will correct themselves is not easy to predict. The climate is changing too quickly, and taking into account the influence of the anthropogenic factor, these changes are becoming more difficult to predict. According to the RAS, the number of natural hazards around the world has quadrupled over the past 40 years. And according to a report released in July by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the average global temperature could rise more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2024, much earlier than scientists had anticipated. Therefore, in the next five years, various regions of the Earth are threatened with large-scale droughts, however, as well as floods. However, next year can still be colder than 2020, due to the fact that El Niño (fluctuations in the temperature of the surface water layer in the equatorial Pacific Ocean).
What should the agrarians do in the light of such prospects? To insure crops? Their confidence in the insurance system has not yet increased globally. Invest in technology? Those who can afford it already bury a lot of money on a hectare. And whoever cannot, is unlikely to afford such investments in anticipation of weather disasters. Hopefully. And, rather, as always, at random, and not on the state, because so far the support of the industry is considered insufficient by agricultural producers. And in the next three years, it can become even smaller.
