Due to the decrease in purchase prices for vegetables, Novosibirsk agricultural producers are at risk of incurring losses. The area for the cultivation of “borscht” set in the region has been increased. The harvest was good. But the prices are not pleasing – due to a decrease in demand, they are below cost. If it is not possible to sell, for example, potatoes, then it will have to be thrown away.
Potato harvesting is being completed in the Novosibirsk region. 89% of the area has been removed. The yield is higher than last year. But at the same time, the purchase prices in the fall of this year collapsed compared to the spring. There is no demand.
“Back in the spring of 2022, we sold potatoes for 25 rubles per kilogram on a large wholesale. Now the price has dropped to 8-10 rubles per kilogram. The implementation is very weak, as demand has fallen significantly. In such a situation, you can lower the price indefinitely – there is simply no one to buy potatoes,” Alexey Leonidov, director of the agricultural enterprise LLC Leonis, told Infopro54.
Alexey Leonidov said that the company has already fully laid the potatoes for storage for seeds, the storages are filled to the brim with commodity tubers. The remaining crop is in cold warehouses and is being sold.
“If we don’t have time to sell before the cold weather, we’ll throw it away. There are no options. Even the price for potatoes of 8 rubles per kilogram is already lower than the cost price. We are told: by the New Year there will be a normal price for all vegetables. But no one gives such a guarantee, and the economy of vegetable growers’ production does not make it possible to build storage facilities “in reserve”. We had a situation when we just built storage facilities… In the fall, we sold potatoes for 12 rubles and thought about how well we could earn in the spring. As a result, in the spring they barely sold it for 5 rubles,” Leonidov added.
This season, the acreage for vegetables in the region has been increased. According to the Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the Novosibirsk region Viktor Anapasenko, the area for vegetables has grown from 800 hectares to 900, potato fields – from 2900 hectares to 3200. But this did not improve the situation.
“The production of potatoes and vegetables of open ground is one of the weakest and undeveloped branches of the Russian and, in particular, the Siberian agro–industrial complex,” commented Сибкрай.ги the editor-in-chief of the magazine “Chairman” Pavel Berezin. – The fact is that potatoes and open ground (the notorious “borscht set”) have not been a priority of state support in the last decade – multibillion-dollar investments and budget injections went into greenhouse production of tomatoes and cucumbers. The idea prevailed: “The main thing is grain, milk, meat and tomatoes, and potatoes with carrots, as usual, people will grow themselves, and if there is not enough, we will buy from neighbors.” But the people did not grow up. The population massively refuses to grow potatoes in private plots: we can see that only around Novosibirsk tens of thousands of hectares of land, on which back in the 90s people grew potatoes “from enterprises and organizations”, are now occupied by grain, or even abandoned. The reduction of acreage and potato production in the households of the population is taking place in almost all regions of Siberia – in the Omsk region, Altai and Krasnoyarsk Territories, Kuzbass.”
This business is unattractive from the point of view of investments today: purchase prices have been very low in recent years, huge investments are required, and state support for the industry is scanty. That’s why we eat potatoes from other regions and neighboring countries. And when we eat the main stocks, in the spring the prices for the “borscht set” will soar again.
A source: https://sibkray.ru
