The drought that threatened Crimea has hit the southern regions of Ukraine
Ukrainian farmers risk being left without a harvest due to drought in the south of the country – in the Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa regions.
This was reported by the Ukraine TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Thus, in the Kherson region the amount of sandy soils is increasing. For local farmer Andrei Shchedrinov, sands have consumed at least 15% of his acreage.
“Beneath us there is a completely layer of sand, it wasn’t here before, the ground here used to be much lower. It was all brought by the wind. I think about twenty percent of the harvest is left here. This applies to barley and wheat too,” says the farmer.
In the Odessa region, the owners of rice paddies turned on the pumps at full speed to pump out water from the Danube, which became shallow in the spring.
“This year the level of the Danube is critically low and there are also certain difficulties with this. Let’s hope that there will be precipitation in the summer and the level will at least not fall lower than it is now,” notes Odessa farmer Valentin Khadzhi.
“Conditions will worsen due to high temperatures and excessive heating of the soil,” Tatyana Adamenko, head of the agrometeorology department of the Hydrometeorological Center of Ukraine, gives her disappointing forecast.
The authors of the story emphasize that drought forces farmers to factor in the risks and cost of irrigation into the future price of finished products, so that already at the end of summer and autumn, Ukrainian vegetables may become more expensive.
Let us remember that earlier the Ukrainian media were frightening about the drought in Crimea, declaring that there would be enough water on the peninsula only until mid-summer. At the same time, the rains over the past few weeks restocked Crimean reservoirs.
And the most problematic region is Simferopol and its environs began to provide additional nutrition artesian water from newly built water pipelines.
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