March 14 2006, 09:14

Odesa farmers give up producing potato in 2006

This season many Odesa oblast farmers will reduce or completely give up planting potato of medium and late varieties, according to the information provided by Dmitriy Chernyak, the Market Information Specialist of Odesa office, Agricultural Marketing Project, to "Agrooglyad: Vegetables and Fruits" weekly journal. This prognosis is based on the preliminary results of fruit and vegetable production and price survey. To some extent, the farmers are forced to make such a decision due to the significant price growth on seeds. At present moment planting materials cost $0.78-0.88/kg. The producers considered the local production costs and concluded they would not be able to stand competition with other oblasts' producers, where the climatic conditions are more favorable for potato.

According to the evaluation done by Valentina Kotsur, the Agronomist of Odesa office, Agricultural Marketing Project, if all the technologies are completed, this year potato production cost will be not less than $0.12/kg on a common Odesa field. This cost does not include harvesting, transportation, storage, marketing expenses. The planting material cost was assumed to be $0.42/kg in this estimation.

Recent years the produce market players have been pointing out that the regions are tend to specialize on a certain crop depending from the natural and climatic conditions. Step by step the local producers give up producing the whole produce assortment: they try to adjust the production program on purpose to use the advantages of climatic zones to the full extent. This is a positive trend; taking into account the dynamics of infrastructure development of the national produce market, we can expect the specialization of the various regions of Ukraine to increase further.