At the end of last week, an article was published in the Polish segment of the Internet with an analysis of the state of raspberry plantations in Poland by a local expert Pavel Kravets. Based on his observations on his farm, P. Krawiec reported serious problems with raspberry plantations in Poland, which could significantly affect the harvest this year. EastFruit tried to figure out what the fall in raspberry production in Poland could lead to and what the situation in the raspberry segment is in other countries of the project.
Poland
The article touches on the state of raspberry plantations on only one farm, which belongs to P. Kravets. It is located in the Lublin Voivodeship, where, according to various estimates, about 70% of all raspberry production in Poland is concentrated. There is also no reason to assume that an expert’s farm is in any way strikingly different from others in the same region. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that extrapolating the situation in one farm to the entire production region always carries the risk of errors.
According to P. Krawiec, the owners of tunnel greenhouses in Poland were forced to dismantle the covering film and parts of the greenhouse structures because of the threat of their collapse due to winter snowfalls. By the way, in some cases, greenhouses did collapse, as, for example, on the expert’s farm.
As a result, plants in greenhouses spent the winter without shelter, which caused damage to the plantations even in winter. Further, the air temperature in the Lublin Voivodeship at night fell below zero for several days in early April, and at the surface, it could reach -7 degrees Celsius. As a result, significant frostbite of flower buds was noted on the farm of Pavel Kravets, and for some varieties, it reached 75-95%.
Serbia
At the end of last week, reports about the adverse impact of weather conditions began to come from Serbia, as well. According to Aleksandar Leposavich (a well-known expert on the fruit and vegetable market in the Balkans), a warm winter in April was followed by snowfalls and a drop in air temperature. As a result, crops that were in the flowering stage or close to it, in particular stone fruits and pears, suffered the most.
Ukraine and Moldova
“In the first half of April, there were short frosts at night in the western and northern regions of Ukraine. The maximum thermometers dropped to -5 degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, the flowering phase in the raspberry segment begins at the end of April, and therefore it is the May frosts that cause the main damage to its plantations. In the meantime, it’s too early to talk about any significant damage, although the danger to part of the crop is still not over,” said Oleksandr Khorev, head of the APK-Inform: Vegetables and Fruits project.
For more information: east-fruit.com