There will most likely be no repetition of the sharp rise in the cost of the "borscht set" that occurred last winter due to the good harvest of vegetables. But, despite this, seasonal fluctuations in prices for them will remain. Specialists of the company "August" told about the main features of crop conservation and pest, disease and weed control on vegetable crops - a major Russian manufacturer of plant protection products (PPP).
“Vegetable crops of large areas (onion, tomato, carrot, table beet, that is, the so-called borscht set) are very demanding on protection. The need for chemical and biological agents for these purposes is due, in particular, to the fact that manual labor is becoming more expensive today, while access to a sufficient amount of labor is decreasing and it becomes almost impossible to find the right number of personnel even for a lot of money, ”says Dmitry Belov, Head of the Product Development Department of JSC Firm "August".
Vegetables are susceptible to various types of pathogens. These are fungal, viral, bacterial diseases, many specific pests that are controlled by a large number of broad-spectrum drugs on other crops. Whereas for vegetable crops it is necessary to use specific preparations, as, for example, to combat caterpillars of lepidoptera pests. Insect growth regulators, ovicides, larvicides, mite repellents, etc. may be needed.
Protection is also needed before storage. Different vegetables have significantly different terms and requirements for storage conditions, which in general is the Achilles' heel of vegetable growing: climate-controlled storage facilities are needed to reduce losses and prevent the development of pathogens. At the same time, products should be sent to warehouses in a healthy state, and timely protection is indispensable here.
Another factor that determines the need for the use of plant protection products in vegetable crops is the high cost of seeds. Thus, the price of a kilogram package of high-quality onion seeds can reach several million rubles. However, diseases such as stemfiliasis or peronosporosis, fusarium rot of the donuts, neck rot, as well as pests (for example, thrips) can cause the death of crops in all areas of the economy within a few days or lead to the fact that, after the loss of presentation, such a product can be sold. products will not be possible. Production on vegetable farms is usually not diversified, as is the case with field crops, when, say, losses in the corn crop are offset by good results in the sunflower harvest. For example, in the Stavropol, Kuban, Volgograd, Saratov, Astrakhan regions, there are farmers who specialize exclusively in onions, and if it dies, the economy of the economy also dies, and the inability to repay debts leads to bankruptcy. Therefore, at the slightest likelihood of developing a pathogen, treatment is carried out with a tank mixture of drugs that are effective against a complex of pathogens.
According to the company's experts, cabbage protection schemes have something in common with the protection schemes of such a popular crop as rapeseed: they belong to the same cruciferous family. Soil herbicides based on, in particular, C-metolachlor are used here; for vegetation against weeds, clopyralid, picloram, etametsulfuron-methyl are used. With diseases, the specifics are about the same: with the help of drugs that are also registered for use on rapeseed and other crops, cabbage is protected from Alternaria, white and gray rot, and mucous bacteriosis. For carrots in Russia, there is an effective set of soil herbicides and herbicides for vegetation against dicotyledonous and cereal weeds; there are a sufficient number of fungicidal preparations against septoria, alternaria, downy mildew on the market. The table beet protection scheme is close to the sugar beet protection scheme, while tomato protection is in many ways similar to potato protection, except that the tomato must additionally be protected from a group of rots - gray and sclerotinia, anthracnose pathogens. In the south of Russia, tomato is also protected from spider mites and cotton bollworm. As for onions, a very serious protection system is available for it in our country based on preparations from both multinational and Russian companies.
“Weed control is the most time-consuming task,” emphasizes Dmitry Belov. – Despite the fact that even now manual labor is used in places for weeding, herbicide treatment is carried out on carrots, beets, onions, tomatoes, and cabbage. The creation of machines that could replace it is still at the level of startups in which mechanical cultivators are used using machine vision technologies and neural networks. Especially high is the need for recognition and removal of weeds in this way on green crops, including lettuce types of cabbage. In general, for the global agricultural market, these technologies are still inaccessible; agricultural enterprises mainly use herbicide protection, since, for example, on farms with large areas of arable land, weeding by hand is almost impossible. In most cases, the use of herbicides is even safer than the use of a poorly motivated workforce.”
The problem of the PPP market for vegetable crops is that many drugs that could protect them in general are not registered for use on them in Russia and cannot be used (although products with similar active ingredients are registered and successfully used to protect vegetables in other countries). states). But the procedure for registering a drug in our country is such that application regulations are developed for each crop and each harmful object separately. At the same time, the payback of registering a drug used on 40 million hectares of cereals will be many times faster than a drug used on 25 hectares of carrots, therefore, drugs for mass crops were registered more often and more in the total volume. Currently, the domestic market for the protection of vegetable crops is 60-70% occupied by products of multinational companies. Often they supply both plant protection products and seeds at the same time, so that the way to the consumer for their products is even shorter than for Russian suppliers. Foreign giants were the first to enter the emerging domestic market, there was almost no competition between them - 2-3 companies shared buyers on it, however, the market developed along with the intensification of agricultural production, the development of logistics and storage systems for vegetable products. Today, many Russian manufacturers also successfully work on it.
This direction is also being developed by the company "August", and if earlier it had to be limited to a herbicide line, today the assortment includes high-quality insecticides and fungicides for vegetable crops, including unique ones that can satisfy both basic and niche needs of vegetable growers. A gradual increase in the supply of plant protection products for vegetables by domestic companies has been in the last ten years.
“In 2022, there were mostly favorable conditions for vegetable growing agro-firms, both in terms of weather and in terms of the absence of significant pests and pathogens. However, the "borscht set" as a whole will continue to gradually rise in price, - comments Dmitry Belov. – Seeds of vegetable crops still remain a scarce position in the field of crop production, the price for them is growing, and even without reference to the exchange rate. Some Russian companies are actively developing this area, but in order to achieve a visible result, such work needs to be scaled up dozens of times.”
The expert states that so far there are no conditions for reducing prices for either fertilizers, or plant protection products, or maintenance and repair of agricultural machinery. At the same time, despite the large volume of the domestic harvest, it will not be possible to avoid March and February deliveries of vegetables from abroad in 2023, since fundamental changes in the Russian storage infrastructure, which would allow saving a significant amount of products for a long time, have not yet occurred. At the same time, in the absence of force majeure events, the consumer will most likely not see the sharp fluctuations in the cost of the "borscht set" that were observed during the current year.