Moscow | Reuters—The first grain from Russia’s new crop has arrived on the market, traders and analysts said on Monday, as top producing regions reported early harvesting results, with an expected drop in the Rostov region and a good harvest in Stavropol.
“Stavropol’s grain harvest exceeded 8.5 million tons. So, this year we’ll definitely have enough bread,” Stavropol Governor Vladimir Vladimirov wrote on his Telegram channel. He said 85 per cent of the grain-sown area had been harvested.
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Three Russian grain traders, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that the first new-crop grain from Stavropol is actively entering the market.
Slow start for new crop exports
Russia’s export volumes fell to their lowest level since 2008 at the start of July due to a late start of the harvesting campaign, and some European traders told Reuters that slow sales of new crop wheat were disrupting the ship loadings at Russia’s Black Sea ports.
Stavropol, the region next to the Caucasus Mountains, is on track to become Russia’s top grain- and wheat-producing region this year after drought hit Rostov, the steppe region along the Don River.
Rostov Governor Yuri Slyusar told the TASS news agency that the grain harvest forecast in the region had been cut by 30 per cent to 8 million tons because of the drought, with about one-fifth of the seeded area there damaged.
In Krasnodar, another top-three grain-producing region, which borders Rostov in the north and Stavropol in the east, a better crop in the south is expected to compensate for losses from drought in the north.
“We expect that the regions where weather conditions were more favourable will help partially compensate for the losses through a high yield,” Governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram.
He estimated the collected grain crop at 8.5 million tons and said the harvesting campaign will be over this week.
Expected to remain top wheat exporter
The governors provided no data on what share of the collected grain was wheat, but in previous years the biggest share of the three regions’ seeded area was under wheat. Russia is expected to remain the world’s largest wheat exporter.
Dmitry Rylko, head of the IKAR consultancy, said the new-crop grain is coming mostly from southern regions, not central Russia, where the weather has been better and which is expected to compensate for crop losses in the south.
“Every day we see that the inflow of grain to the terminals is increasing,” Rylko said. He noted that, for the moment, there is a shortfall of new grain to cover fresh contracts but expects the gap to disappear within one or two weeks.
The Agriculture Ministry forecasts this year’s grain harvest at 135 million tons, including 90 million tons of wheat. This figure includes grain from Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine, which analysts do not include in their estimates.
As drought ravages Russia’s key agricultural regions, including Rostov, which supplied 12 per cent of Russian wheat in 2024, the official estimate is in doubt. President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that there are questions over this year’s harvest.
—Additional reporting by Mikhael Hogan in Hamburg
