Under the sweltering sun and in temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius, farmers in the Rostov region, Russia’s breadbasket, toil to salvage a harvest battered by heatwave, frosts and floods. Accounting for 11% of Russia’s total grain harvest last year, Rostov is one of the key regions that Russia’s agriculture ministry has said it is monitoring to make further adjustments to an already soft 2024 crop forecast. The ministry’s most recent estimate, made in April and maintained into last week, is for the Russian grain harvest to reach 132 million tonnes in 2024 – down 9% from 145 million in 2023, and 16% from a record 158 million in 2022.

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