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In early November last year, agronomist and agricultural consultant Mike Lee touched down in the Russian city of Voronezh and took to the roads for an eight-day tour to assess the winter crops in the Black Sea region.
After travelling close to 900km in Russia, Lee crossed the border into Ukraine just west of the town of Sudzha. From there, he would travel another 700km that would take him all the way to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
Originally from Liverpool, Lee has been coming to the Black Sea countries since the 1990s. Today, he regularly makes these expeditions through rural Ukraine and Russia at key stages of the grain growing season to assess crops and their yield potential.
“There’s a complete lack of appreciation for what’s happening in the Black Sea region and the scale out there,” says Lee. “There’s a revolution taking place there. If you look back 10 years ago, Russia wasn’t exporting any wheat. Today, it’s the number one wheat exporter in the world and it’s growing. And I think other wheat producers should be aware of that and so should farmers.”
Emerging from Soviet times
Before its break-up in the 1990s, agriculture in the Soviet Union was collectivised, with farm units anywhere between 5,000ha to 10,000ha in size. According to Lee, the yield and output per hectare of these farms was actually similar to the US but they used about five times more energy to achieve that level of production. Tractors were using a huge amount of diesel, while fertiliser was just shovelled on without a plan.
What remains today is these 5,000ha to 10,000ha holdings that vary from derelict farms to working commercial organisations. However, from a policy point of view, agriculture in the Black Sea is still very much a command-led system.
“Kiev or Moscow will say you must do this and it will filter down into the provinces or oblasts. When I was farming in Ukraine, you might be told that you must grow corn regardless of what anybody else was saying. We had to grow corn because the government could then export it for cash dollars because the country was broke,” says Lee.
However, for differing reasons, the agriculture policy in both Russia and Ukraine has become more proactive in supporting agriculture. This means more and more hectares are being planted in crops in both countries and will continue to rise. Output and yield per hectare is also rising, says Lee.
The big five crops in the Black Sea are winter wheat and winter barley, and then it’s the spring crops of maize, sunflowers and soya. Sugar beet is also popular in Russia. Potato production is also doing quite well, although Lee says there is a huge opportunity to improve yields.
Proactive policy
Last year, wheat yields in Ukraine and Russia were 1.7t/acre and 1.2t/acre respectively. But this was more to do with favourable rainfall at key times of the growing season rather than any major improvements in farming. Lee says there is still a lot of simple things that could be done to improve production in these countries.
“A lot of the seed used by farmers has poor genetic potential so that could be improved quite easily by bringing in non-Russian or Ukrainian wheat varieties which they currently don’t use,” says Lee. Fertiliser application is also a big problem as many spreaders are not maintained.
“There’s bits of metal welded on to keep them going,” he says. “The spinning discs on a spreader are specifically engineered to accurately distribute fertiliser and give an even spread pattern. And when you multiply that up with the amount of farmers that are not applying their fertiliser accurately, the loss in production is huge.”
Lee says that if every farmer installed new spinning discs on their fertiliser spreaders this season, the collective gain in yield and output from the improved fertiliser application would be enormous.
Likewise, many farmers are using sprayers where nozzles haven’t been changed or repaired in years. Lee says none of the agriculture ministries in the Black Sea region are interested in incentivising these improvements.
“They want to buy lots of big green tractors and yellow combines and focus on expensive irrigation because that’s how they see the way forward. And to some extent that is important but to me there’s so many little things that can be done. If the ministry was serious about it and found $0.5m to replace all the sprayer nozzles in the country you would get a bigger return on that money than you would if you spent $20m buying a handful of tractors and combines.”
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