State of Winter Crops in Russia This Year Worse than at Any Time in the Past, Soil Experts Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 11 – Only about a third of Russia’s winter crops are in good condition while another third is in poor or ungerminated condition, the result of droughts this past year and a development that will hit Russian food production hard in the coming months, according to the ProZerno portal.
    The situation with winter crops “has NEVER been this bad” in Russia before, the experts say; and with global warming, it will only get worse (prozerno.ru/index.php/novosti/1339-otritsatelnyj-rekord-sostoyaniya-ozimykh-posevov-v-rossii-na-konets-oseni-2024-goda and nemoskva.net/2024/12/11/v-rossii-rekordno-nizkoe-kachestvo-ozimyh-posevov-pered-zimoj/).
    Irrigation projects will do little to slow let alone reverse this trend, and the only option will be to take more and more land out of food production and plant new forests that will at least prevent massive erosion and still more environmental and food production losses, ProZerno’s Aleksey Yaroshenko says.
    In the short term, this development means that Russia will produce less food in its winter plantings, leading to food shortages and higher prices, pushing up inflation still further and possibly forcing the Russian government to seek to purchase substitutes on the international market.