According to a number of experts, the current global warming may eventually increase the area under soybeans in our country.
According to the International Grains Council (IGC), Russia has been actively expanding soybean production over the past 10 years, during which time production volumes have doubled.
It is planned that this season the harvest will increase by another 10%, which can be considered a fairly good result.
The final harvest may amount to 7 million tons. For comparison, last season it was 6.7 million tons.
It is emphasized that at the moment Russia occupies a rather modest place in the global soybean market, which cannot even be compared, for example, with its place in the wheat market, where it is a key supplier.
But there are certainly prospects for growth, and climate change can contribute to this to a large extent.
Gradual warming frees up lands that were previously considered unsuitable for soybean cultivation due to the climate.
There are also several other reasons why Russian farmers are increasingly interested in growing soybeans.
— Growing demand for soybean processing products. There is great interest from the food and feed industries.
— Export attractiveness of this crop. For example, China is actively purchasing soybeans, so almost all of this crop grown in the Far East is exported to China.
— High profitability of soybeans compared to many other crops, for example, the same wheat.
— Useful properties of soybeans for fixing nitrogen in the soil make it a valuable element of the crop rotation cycle, since many plants will bear fruit much better after it.
It is noted that the yield of soybeans in the Russian Federation is currently practically not growing, so an increase in the yield usually only means an expansion of sown areas.
Interestingly, Russia is the largest soybean growing country in the CIS, but it imports up to 1.5 million tons of soybeans annually.
This is explained by the large size of the country: it is more profitable to sell soybeans grown in the Far East to China, and to import soybeans grown in other countries to the European part, than to transport the crop from the eastern regions to the center.
The volume of soybean exports from Russia currently amounts to about 1 million tons over the past few years.
There is hope that climate change will contribute to an increase in the volume of cultivation of this crop and turn the country into a net exporter of this type of product.
