Maize yields this season will range from 6 to 7 tons per hectare, which the Minister of Agriculture Branislav Nedimovic recently assessed as satisfactory. He said that the drought had taken its toll, and that a reduction in yield was inevitable, but that agriculture would not be in the red. He emphasized that we can expect production results at the level of the ten-year average.
The exact data on the total yield will be known only in October, because the corn harvest in Serbia is not over yet and it is late this year. It is estimated that we are only halfway through the harvest. It is expected that this cereal will be 20 to 23 percent less than in 2020.
The Advisory Agricultural Expert Service in Prokuplje recently said that the corn harvest in the Toplica district will last until the second half of October, because the time of ripening of the classes depends on the altitude at which it is sown, as well as on hybrid varieties.
Do farmers think like this, and will, according to what is now speculated, most of them sell the quantities of corn they have at the very beginning, unlike last year when they waited for a better price for a long time?
Suncica Savovic, the director of the association “Zita Srbije”, states that this depends on the liquidity of the producers, on how many crops they produce, whether they rent the land, how much they have spent and how much storage space they have.
Given the unpredictable movement of prices and the fact that they are higher than on the international, as well as the fact that there are no goods on the market, it could be concluded that farmers will still wait for better opportunities. The new crop is just being removed from the fields, some have contracted production with exporters, and as far as our exports are concerned, contracts for about 300,000 tons have already been signed.
When it comes to the total export of corn, the precise data will be known in about ten days, when the economic year ends.
“We can still say that about 3.1 million tons will be exported, which is slightly more than in 2020,” our interlocutor notes. Last year, the average yield of corn in Serbia was 8.1 tons per hectare, and the total yield was 8.1 million tons, which was a good result but not a record achieved two years earlier.
Some experts, however, expect that due to the severe drought, the yield will be significantly lower. Small grain expert Miroslav Malesevic told Beta that the yield of corn this year will be at least 40 percent lower than the average, and 50 percent lower compared to last year, when it was a record.
He added that there are fields where there is nothing to harvest and where the damage is 100 percent, because even the stems are fried at high temperatures.
Zivota Jovanovic, marketing manager at the Zemun Polje Maize Institute, also agrees with this assessment.
“Many parts of Serbia have been affected by drought since June 15, and in addition to poor yields, there are also problems with quality, the graininess of the cob is weak and it is “shallow”, Jovanovic told the agency, adding that the average yield could be from 4.5 to five tons per hectare, Sputnik News reports.
