Information for fruit and vegetables business in CIS
Warm weather favours winter crops
On the last eleven days of January the temperature conditions for wintering of grains and perennial grasses in Ukraine were generally satisfactory, Ukrainian Centre for Hydro-Meteorology has informed.
The specialists said that thanks to unsteady freezing-down of soil and considerable amount of precipitations, fallen in January, the Ukrainian farmland was seeing favourable conditions for formation of optimal moisture stocks in the soil for the spring period. Also, thanks to the presence of a snow cover and shallow freezing-down of the soil, the minimal soil temperature at the tillering node depth in the periods of the most profound temperature drops was ranging around minus 1 to 7 degrees Celsius. Such soil temperatures were considerably above the critical points of freezing-out, which, according to calculations of agro-meteorologists, constituted as of the end of January minus 15 to 17 degrees for medium frost-resistance winter wheat varieties in the tillering phase, and minus 14 degrees for the same varieties in shooting phase. The rated freezing-out temperature of winter barley for the period is minus 10 to 12 degrees.
In the final period of January an ice crust was in presence on the fields of Sumy, Chernigov, eastern areas of Kiev, some locations of Cherkassy, Poltava and Vinnitsa Oblasts. The duration lodgement exceeded the critical one only in some locations of Chernigov Oblasts.
Due to anomalously warm weather in the analysed period, a weak vegetation of winter crops was going on in the AR of Crimea and southern areas of Kherson Oblast.
According to the retrospective data analysis, a similar development of agro-meteorological processes was observed in Ukraine (in its eastern part) in Januaries of 1990 and 2002.