Wheat Yield 39.8 Percent Lower Than Last Year

This year’s wheat yield is estimated at 578 thousand tons, which is 39.8 percent less than last year’s, and the yields of barley and oats have also decreased, announced the State Bureau of Statistics (DZS) in its early estimates of important early crops.

According to DZS data, wheat was sown on 105 thousand hectares, and the expected yield is 5.5 tons per hectare or a total of 578 thousand tons, which is 39.8 percent less than last year.

Official statistics in the estimates of yields of important early crops do not provide a comparison of data on sown areas, which primarily affected the reduction of the total wheat yield as the areas under wheat, as previously announced by DZS, were the smallest in the last 26 years.

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DZS, in fact, announced at the end of June early estimates of the areas of important crops according to which wheat was sown on 100 thousand hectares, which is 68 thousand hectares or 40.5 percent less area than in 2016.

Although the latest yield data shows that wheat was sown on 105 thousand hectares, which is five thousand hectares more than in the first area estimate, it is still significantly less, by 37.5 percent, compared to the areas from which wheat was harvested last year.

The average yield of wheat is, however, equal to the yields of previous years, considering that earlier DZS data shows that in 2016 the average yield was 5.7 tons per hectare, and in 2015 it was 5.4 tons per hectare.

DZS data on early estimates of yields of important early crops also show that barley was sown on an area of 53 thousand hectares, and the average yield is 4.4 tons per hectare. Thus, the total barley yield is estimated at 233 thousand tons, which is 11.4 percent less than last year.

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The yield of oats is estimated to have decreased by 7.5 percent, to 74 thousand tons. The total area under oats was 23 thousand hectares, and the estimated yield per hectare is 3.2 tons.

The yield of rapeseed this year is higher by 27.4 percent and is estimated at a total of 144 thousand tons. The area under rapeseed was 48 thousand hectares, and the expected yield per hectare is 3 tons, according to early estimates of the yields of important crops in 2017.

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These data are the first information from the State Bureau of Statistics on the level of yields of early crops, and the statistics are based on the results of the autumn sowing survey for the family farm survey in 2016, the results of the survey on sown areas and plantations at the end of the spring sowing this year, and from available administrative sources – Ministry of Agriculture, Agency for Payments in Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development, etc.