All wheat? Should I grow wheat or switch to other crops?

Bread is the head of everything, but over the past year, many farmers have thought about revising the crops in the crop rotation. High export duties, falling prices on the domestic market, rising prices for agricultural machinery and components, problems with logistics - this is not the whole set of difficulties that farmers faced in the 2022/23 season, and continue to face further.

Some farmers have already planned to revise the crop rotation and reduce the area under wheat.

Whether everything is so bad with wheat and what to grow instead of it, the experts of Grain-Aggregator understood.
How have wheat prices changed?

According to Rosstat, the average price of wheat has decreased by 30% since January 2022 and amounted to 10,178 rubles in July. Such a drop in prices did not go unnoticed - farmers began to hold grain in warehouses and significantly reduced sales.

For comparison, we looked at how prices for other crops have changed:

rye showed a decrease of 55%

buckwheat fell by 39%

dried peas fell in price by 64%

rapeseed showed a decrease of 48%

sunflower seeds fell in price by 57%.

The analysis showed a significant decline in prices for all major crops, but it is worth noting that the decline was smaller for wheat.

Using data from the same source, we decided to analyze how the price of grain and other crops changed from 2020 to 2023, and this is what we got:

the cost of wheat in June 2023 is 22% lower (by 2821 rubles) than in June 2020. Also cheaper: rye by 26% (by 2645 rubles), buckwheat by 43% (by 13363 rubles). The cost of the following crops increased: dried peas - by 3% (+433 rubles), rape seeds - by 19% (+6255 rubles), sunflower seeds - by 0.5% (+125 rubles). In July 2022, all of the listed crops rose significantly in price, but then prices began to decline rapidly.

Based on the analytics data, we can conclude that for all crops there are serious price fluctuations, but at the same time, wheat shows greater stability. This crop did not have big price rises, but there were no big drops either, although it turns out that now the price of wheat is even slightly below the level of 2020.
And what about the world market?

According to the website zerno.ru, Russian indicative prices for wheat rose to $237.70/mt, corn and barley dropped to $196.00/mt and $175.50/mt. Wheat prices continue to rise after the cancellation of the grain deal, which, according to the Minister of Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev, will allow leaving more funds with Russian agricultural producers.

According to the Rosselkhoznadzor, Vietnam has adjusted its phytosanitary requirements and excluded the weed plant wild thistle from the list of quarantine objects, so that Russian farmers will have another opportunity to expand the geography of export deliveries. According to experts' forecasts, the expected volume of wheat exports to Viet Man in the near future may reach 1.5 billion dollars (more than 140 billion rubles).

With a growing global population and climate change, demand for wheat and other grains will remain high. Over 691 million people worldwide are affected by hunger in 2022, according to a FAO report. These are residents of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other regions.

At the same time, the director of the analytical company ProZerno, Vladimir Petrichenko, believes that next season the wheat harvest on the domestic market will again be large, although slightly less than this year. From this we can conclude that the domestic market will again face large carry-over stocks, lack of storage and underworking capacities, as well as problems in logistics.
To grow wheat next year or not?

It is definitely not worth refusing to grow wheat on your own fields, since this crop is always in demand and will continue to be in demand in the market. In some cases, it is worth revising technological maps and changing the areas under crops.

When making a decision, one should not forget about the volume of grain carry-overs on the farm, the availability of conditions for drying, working and storage, the weather conditions in autumn for sowing winter crops.

To increase the profitability of production, some experts advise striving to reduce costs through the qualitative execution of technological parameters, for example, leveling the field for sowing, making planned top dressings in those phases of crop development that will bring the maximum response of the variety to the field. High-margin, but also investment-requiring measures to reduce costs include top dressing according to physiological phases, breeding work with varieties and seed material.

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