The rainfall, which should stop in a few days, encourages farmers to expect a good harvest, as wheat makes a EUR1 billion business a year for them.
Planting the seeds is the first step towards next year’s harvest and the experience of the 2012/2013 season showed a draughty autumn lowers productivity.
The amount of land allocated to wheat in the past five years has never gone down below 1.9 million hectares, or a quarter of the total arable land in the country.
“The rain is always good for farming. It is important that it stop so as to allow planting the seeds at the best time,” says farmer George Enescu, manager of Agromec Sarulesti in Calarasi, southern Romania, which farms 1,000 hectares of land.
“If the sowing is done after the best time for it has passed, the costs are higher because the amount of seeds required is higher.”
Rainfall should stop in Baragan (SE Romania, a major cereal-growing area) in a few days and temperatures should rise to 18 to 21 degrees Celsius at the end of next week.
“We need to wait for five of six days after the rain stops for the land to dry. (…) We have to organize and move quickly to sow everything at the best time for it,” says Ion Bujor, manager of Agrocov Galati, a 6,000 hectare farm in SE Romania. A third of the farm’s land was affected by rain and floods a week ago, he added.
“With agriculture you never know, when you say it’s fine, something bad happens.”
Local farmers should also benefit from favorable circumstances in the region, considering Russia and Ukraine, Romania’s main two competitors in the Black Sea region, have already been affected by the heavy rainfall. Wheat is at risk in the former Soviet economies because sowing is progressing slowly due to the rain.
Only 10 million hectares, half of the scheduled area of land, had been planted by the end of September in the two countries. The delay of the sowing makes plants vulnerable to freezing in the winter because of the insufficient time to develop until then.
The condition of the wheat market and of other grain in general in Russia and Ukraine has a direct influence on Romania’s agriculture through prices.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)