Bad farming habits force Soviets to import grain

Press, 7 September 1984, Page 20

Bad farming habits force Soviets to import grain

If American forecasts are correct, New Zealand wheat farmers could benefit considerably this year. The Soviet Union is expected to buy a quarter of all the wheat available on the world market. MARK FRANKLAND reports from Moscow.

J. Years of bad farming habits have damaged soil . fertility throughout much of the Soviet Union and are a major cause of recent poor harvests. ’lf the latest estimate by the American Department of Agriculture is correct, this-year’s Soviet grain crop may be only 180 million tonnes — 10 million less than the department expected only a month ago. . The Soviet Agriculture Ministry, publishes neither harvest estimates nor, since 1981, results. Last year’s harvest was probably around 195 million tonnes. The best ever, in 1978, reached 237 million.

. While crop figures have bounced up and down, soil fertility has steadily decreased. Soviet agronomists say that 50 years of careless cultivation has so depleted the soil’s humus content — a key component of fertility — that in places it scarcely remains fertile a,t all. . The situation is worst in Central Russia, where soil that was never naturally rich has lost half its humus in the last half century. The proportion of humus here varies from a low 1.5 per cent to a wretched 0.2 per cent at which point it is hardly soil any nfore.

> The prime grain lands of the socalled “black earth zone” are cal-

culated to have lost up to a third of their humus, which now averages from 5 to 6 per cent. Specialists have no doubt how this major ecological crisis devel-. oped. Under pressure to produce ever more grain, farms have ignored crop rotation and maintenance of clean fallows, both of which replenish the soil. By 1977, clean fallows had been cut back to half the area of seven years earlier. Organic fertiliser (manure) was neglected in favour of chemicals, which unlike the former do not restore the vital humus content. Western farmers may be equally guilty on this score but their use of chemicals is heavy enough to balance out temporarily any ill effects. A third of the Soviet grain area receives little or no chemical fertiliser in spite of the huge increase in their production. Frequent changing of farm

managers has reduced resistance to practices that were bound to be damaging in the long-run. Twothirds of all directors of State and collective farms were replaced in the five years after 1976. Fly-by-night managers have neither time nor inclination to worry about the future. Their daily concern is the present year’s crop. The state of the soil explains the poor and unstable crop yields. If American estimates are correct, Soviet farms will this year produce an average of just over 1% tonnes of wheat per hectare. This is almost a tonne less than American farmers, admittedly with a better climate, can achieve. But a homegrown comparison makes the same point. Russians growing potatoes on their private plots often get twice the yield of the State farm next door. Private plots, it turns out, have a much higher humus content than State

lands because their owners apply enough manure (as often .as not bought'illegally from the workers on State farms). Many farmers, one Soviet specialist says, "still haven’t understood how great the approaching danger is.” The Government, though, is now working hard to bring back crop rotation and oldfashioned manure. This year, for the first time in many years, the correct proportion of land has been left fallow, though a shortage of labour, transport, and roads will still make proper manuring difficult.

Moscow’s dilemma is that halting and then reversing the decline in soil fertility clashes with the need to produce more feed-grain, so that ambitious meat and milk targets can be met. The price of saving the soil could be several more years of high grain imports. The United States Department of Agriculture forecasts the Soviet Union will import a near-record 43 million tonnes of grain this year. The reduction of land under wheat this year and weather damage to some parts of the crop may oblige the Soviet Government to buy as much as a quarter of all the wheat available on the world market — Copyright — London Observer Service.