Russian Harvest Latest

The Russian Ministry say that the 2009 grain harvest stood at 70.8 MMT as of Sept 8th off 28 million hectares, averaging 2.53 MT/ha.

The wheat harvest as of Sept 8th stood at 45 MMT and the barley harvest at 15 MMT, they say. Progress is around 10-14 days behind last year.

So far so good, now it starts to get confusing....

There's still around 19 million hectares left to harvest they say, if that yields 2.5 MT/ha then we have another 47.5 MMT still standing in the fields, making for a total crop of 118 MMT, 10 MMT more than last year.

The ministry's official estimate is still only 85 MMT, although they did concede a few days ago that production might come in 9-14% higher than this. A 14% increase would give us 97 MMT.

It will be remembered that the ministry consistently under-estimated the size of last years crop by some significant magnitude.

SovEcon say that this season's grain crop will be 94-98 MMT, and that wheat will make up 60 MMT of that.