Leaving the Russian Countryside

Location: Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Local Time: 9:21 AM
Madison Time: 12:21 AM

It's corn-harvest time!

Today is my last day in southern Russia. I will be taking an overnight train back up to Moscow tonight where I will have additional meetings with government officials and grain commodity experts. Whereas most of the interviews that Sasha and I conducted last week were with medium- to large-scale private farm directors (operations ranging from about 1500 to 5000 hectares, or 3500 to 12000 acres), I spoke with several individuals managing large agriholding companies this week - the largest one encompassing more than 170,000 acres - more than half the size of Rhode Island!

One of the companies had significantly higher yields, nearly twice the levels of some of the other farms. However, this enterprise was located in a region that did not experience drought as the others had. The director also seemed to feel that they had sufficient rain even in previous years, which was in contrast to other directors who felt that in non-drought years, moisture deficiency is still a major problem. (Side note - it hasn't rained once since I arrived here nearly 3 weeks ago.) However, no one seemed to have the financial resources available through either private funds or government subsidies to invest in irrigation infrastructure.

The Azov Sea nearby the high-yielding enterprise.

A country house near the Azov Sea.

In many senses, though, it seemed that a lot of the problems faced by the medium-to-large private enterprises scaled up and were problems for the large agriholding companies as well. On average the yields seemed to be roughly comparable, and the agriholding companies had the same difficulties acquiring capital to make investments in better equipment and technologies.  Sasha and I spoke with one agricultural economist who mentioned that a lot of agriholding companies regard the land that they cultivate as a safety net. Some of the larger companies are involved with large-scale grain export and buy a majority of the grain from other producers. They rely on the grain that they produce to cushion the years in which grain prices are high, and therefore do not necessarily invest heavily into that portion of the company. So while increasing yields on their existing lands might be a goal for them, it might not be the biggest priority.

Something that I found very interesting throughout this trip was learning about the land tenure system in Russia's breadbasket. During Soviet times, much of the land was farmed through massive state or collective enterprises. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a lot of this land was redistributed to shareholders - many of whom now lease their land to these medium-to-large private and agriholding enterprises. Most of the directors I spoke with pay rent to the shareholders through barter rather than with money, providing them with certain portions of the grain output.

It will be interesting to return back to Moscow and speak with individuals who can provide a broad overview of the agricultural sector, and compare how this overview fits with my experience on the ground. Until next time!

Last morning in Rostov-on-Don.

On the Farm

Location: Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Local Time: 10:01 PM
Madison Time: 1:01 PM

Hello again! I had a brief hiatus there after several days packed with meetings and travel. Sasha and I have had the chance to meet with a few wheat growers, and went on an excursion to see the experimental plots of the Don State Agrarian University with Prof. Zelensky, the Dean of their Agronomy Department, who showed us examples of some intercropping methods that he is developing.

The greenhouse and vineyards of Don State Agrarian University.

Sasha and Prof. Zelensky discussing a corn variety used on one of the experimental plots.

From my time here, I've started to get a feel for the cropping systems through meetings and official interviews for my study, as well as through observation. One thing I've noticed through my travels in the Russian countryside is how widely fire is used to manage crop residue. While it is illegal, it is quite common to see both charred fields as well as some actively burning. I was surprised since this is not a common land management practice in Wisconsin, although it is in other parts of the US.

Massive plume of smoke from a field burning in the distance.

These intentional, prescribed fires differ from the forest fires that I documented in an earlier entry, which were the result of extreme drought and heat. However, other signs of this season's drought are visible across the landscape, and farmers are reporting significant wheat yield losses, often between 0.5 to 1 metric tons per hectare - which when you are starting off around 3 - 3.5 metric tons per hectare is considerable.

A harvested wheat field with weeds that would otherwise be green, but are dessicated from the drought.

The drought is also pushing back the sowing campaigns of many farmers here, as they are waiting for rains to come so they can plant in moister soil conditions. However, farmers in some parts of the region have planted already, which was visible on the drive back to Rostov-on-Don today.

Winter wheat seedlings starting to sprout in a recently planted field in Rostov.

While research keeps me very busy, I have had some time to continue to explore some of the region's culture. Sasha and I happened upon a festival this weekend along the Don River in Rostov-on-Don that showcased dance performances from ethnic minorities found in southern Russia. We caught an informal performance by Cossack women - a martial group that has been inhabiting the region since at least the 15th century...

... as well as a beautiful Georgian performance...

Tomorrow we're off to investigate the wheat cropping systems of western Rostov near the Azov Sea. More on that later!

Into the Field

Location: Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Local Time: 11:19 PM - Getting better!
Madison Time: 2:19 PM

A field being plowed in western Rostov - the age of some of the equipment being used is strikingly older in Rostov than in Wisconsin.

Здравствуйте! (Zrasdt-vwee-tye, or, Hello!) Since the last time I've written, Sasha and I have made a lot of progress in terms of our interviews with wheat growers and other wheat industry experts. We have had a very colorful experience along the way - one peppered with bureaucracy, extreme generosity, concern that I'm a spy, interesting conversations, and lots and lots of black tea, instant coffee, and feral dogs. I'm quickly learning that Russia is a country of surprising contrasts.

Much of our first day in Rostov was spent at the local Ministry of Agriculture attempting (unsuccessfully) to set up a meeting to learn about policies and trends relevant to wheat production in the region. Given the amount of energy that Sasha put forth trying to schedule this meeting, this rejection was our first real disappointment of the trip.

So, we had to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and say, onward and upward! We had a meeting the next day scheduled with Prof. Nikolai Zelensky, Dean of the Agronomy Department at Don State Agrarian University - the main agricultural university in the Rostov - who specializes in improving the efficiency of agricultural systems through intercropping. What was scheduled to be an hour long meeting turned into a 3 hour long discussion of winter wheat production in Rostov. He provided a wealth of information on production trends and practices in the region. It was interesting to learn about the very different and more reluctant relationship between between the university and crop producers relative to Wisconsin, where the university is a major disseminator of information used by farmers. The meeting left Sasha and me curious to learn more about the ability and interest of farmers in adopting new technologies and the potential impact on productivity, something that we will continue to investigate.

Today, we had our first meeting with a wheat producer in Rostov. We traveled about an hour east of the city center to meet with a manager and an agronomist of an agriholding enterprise - one of the three types of farms in Russia (the other two being "private peasant" and "private household" farms). "Agriholding" is term that encapsulates a number of different types of companies. The unclear definition reflects a land tenure system that is still evolving following the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, more often than not it refers to a private company that rents fields to grow crops.

It was exciting to finally hear from the manager and agronomist what is happening on the ground - what yields the company is achieving, what management practices they are using, and what constraints they are facing. Data!

A field most recently used to grow wheat in the Bagaevsky District of Rostov.

After the meeting, we stopped off to take pictures of a beautiful cathedral in the middle of the little rural town of Manychskaya.

Welcome to Manychskaya. Established in 1593.

Manychskaya Cathedral in background. Former base of a statue of Lenin in the foreground that was torn down after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While walking around the grounds, we struck up a conversation with three men who worked for the church and its orphanage. They invited us for tea, and as with the professor, what was supposed to be a short visit turned into a three hour visit, complete with a guided tour of the convergence of the Don and Manych Rivers...

... more tea and a lunch prepared from the local potatoes and tomatoes from the region...

Our gracious hostess, Olga

... and a chance to try the well water that has been claimed to perform miracles. The kids were very excited to meet someone from America and to hear English spoken. Like a good Wisconsinite, I taught them to say "cheese!" when we took a group picture...

Their generosity was incredible and made for a fantastic ending to our first excursion into the Russian countryside. Tomorrow we will meet with an agricultural economist, and Friday we have our second trip into the field to meet with another wheat producer. Until next time!

And into southern Russia we go!

Location: Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Time: A little earlier than last
Madison Time: 4:43 PM

Hello from Rostov-on-Don. Sasha and I boarded the train in Moscow yesterday afternoon, and arrived early this morning, about 670 miles later, to the provincial capital of Rostov and Russia's tenth largest city. We had shared a sleeper room with a Russian vacuum cleaner salesman who seemed rather perplexed to be sharing a room with an American who didn't eat meat and who was so excited by all of the agricultural fields we were passing. I suppose it might seem odd if an American found a Russian tourist so excited to see a corn field. But here we were, finally in the part of the world I have been reading about for the past couple of years!

Sasha reading the latest news about global yield gaps in our fancy sleeper room!

                                                
Quickly after leaving Moscow, we passed by stretches of small and clustered dachas, or rural homes owned by city dwellers that are often visited on weekends and used to grow vegetables. As we continued, Sasha pointed out the vast amounts of agricultural land abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has been documenting using remote sensing data.

A couple hours after departing the city, we began to pass evidence of the fires that have ravaged Russia this summer due to the prolonged drought and extreme heat that have plagued the region.

                              Tracks of forest with empty forest floors and blackened tree trunks - evidence of a recent fire.


As we headed south, we noticed the soils turning darker as we approached the Black Earth Region - a region renowned for its fertile Chernozem soils, which are correlated with the region's significance as a breadbasket. Cultivated lands also became more frequent.

When the sun set, we continued to work on the interviews that we will carry out with the wheat farmers of Rostov. We spent the day getting settled  in the city and renting a car that we will use to drive to the countryside. Tomorrow we will begin the day with a visit to the Rostov Ministry of Agriculture where we will continue obtaining contact information for interview participants. Until next time!

View of the sun setting over Russian agricultural lands from the sleeper room.

                                      
                                 

                       

The First Days: Moscow

Location: Moscow, Russia

Local Time: Way too late

Madison Time: 6:55 PM

Greetings from Moscow! A couple of hours after departing from Stockholm, I arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport where Sasha met me and we began our journey carrying our weight in luggage across the city. I had left the States on Tuesday afternoon, and was a little confused to realize it was now Wednesday afternoon. After some coffee and food, Sasha and I set out to check out some of the city. We walked by many of the old Eastern Orthodox churches, the Moskva River, and Kremlin...

The next morning I got acquainted with some Russian food for breakfast - including "pie water" and "baked milk". Sasha and I then set out for our first meeting of the trip with SovEcon - Russia's only independent agricultural commodity consulting company. We had a fruitful conversation in which we introduced the project and learned about some of the important drivers of wheat production in Russia, as well as how grain markets are structured and how wheat prices have been changing over time. The meeting provided important information about the wheat industry that will help us to structure further data collection. After the meeting we spent some more time checking out important cultural spots around Moscow - of course the old KGB building! And the theater district, some beautiful architecture, and the fanciest grocery store I've ever seen...

Today we had a couple of very interesting meetings. First, we met with Professor Tatyana Nefedova at the Institute of Geography in Moscow who has conducted extensive rural sociology work in Russia. She provided fascinating insight into the Russian agricultural system, and helped us to restructure our interviews to make them more appropriate and culturally sensitive for Russian wheat growers. She brought to light issues such as the importance of being careful when speaking with wheat growers in Russia about weather. In the States, weather is a comfortable topic to discuss that can be used as an icebreaker in a formal interview, but she pointed out that weather conditions are more contentious in Russia, especially given this year's extreme drought conditions and the ramifications it has had for wheat productivity - bringing the topic up too soon could actually make wheat growers feel agitated instead of relaxed and divert the focus of the interview...

Sasha and I wrapped up the day with a visit to the NGO Transparent World, where we learned about the state of remote sensing data used to monitor emergency situations in Russia. Tomorrow we will leave for our next stop - Rostov-on-Don in the important wheat-producing oblast of Rostov where we will conduct interviews with researchers, wheat growers, and other industry experts. We will set out in the afternoon for an overnight train ride to the region. More on that later!

Getting Started

Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Local Time: 8:48 AM
Madison Time: 12:48 AM

Welcome! Thank you for visiting my blog "From the Ground Up: Exploring Global Breadbaskets." I will be using this site to document my research trip to Russia and France where I will be collecting information on the winter wheat cropping systems of the Southern Federal District (Russia) and Picardie (France) - two of the most important wheat growing regions in the world.

This work stemmed from a global-scale study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography in which colleagues and I - at the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison - compared the yields across regions with similar growing climates. We did so for 18 different crops, using global yield and harvested area datasets representing conditions circa the year 2000, as well as monthly climatology data from the CRU. By comparing yields within similar climates, we were able to determine the maximum yield currently being achieved in different types of climate, as well as how the actual yields of regions compare with their "maximum climatic potential", or, their "yield gap".

In the study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, we observed a striking gap in the yields of several crops between Eastern and Western Europe. Since we had in effect controlled for climate, we hypothesize that the range in yields between the two regions is due to other factors, such as land management practices and crop varieties/genetics. We have decided to test this hypothesis through a suite of case studies on winter wheat in the Southern Federal District and Picardie. I am therefore setting out to collect information on the major characteristics of the winter wheat cropping systems in these regions, to understand how they compare with one another, and what the major constraints to winter wheat productivity are. I will collect information through interviews with winter wheat experts ranging from commodity industry executives, university researchers, and crop consultants, as well as through interviews with winter wheat growers themselves. I will be traveling for approximately 7 weeks across Russia and France, where I will be collaborating with Dr. Alexander Prishchepov of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Thierry Dore, and Dr. David Makowski of INRA-AgroParisTech.

My first stop is to Moscow where I will meet up with Alexander and begin to speak with experts who can speak to winter wheat production patterns in the regions we will be visiting. Please join me on this journey by following my posts. I welcome thoughts, reactions, ideas, and comments. For now, off to Russia!