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HAMBURG – Germany’s barley harvest will probably still be larger than last year despite heavy rains, which are slowing down the harvest and some losses from the storms, the agricultural association of the state DBV announced on Thursday.
Record rainfall and floods, especially in southern and western Germany, claimed heavy lives last week in the country’s worst natural disaster for almost six decades.
“We still have no precise information from the flood areas about the extent of the damage,” said the DBV in a harvest report. “But it must be expected that there will be a total loss of the harvest in many fields.”
Nevertheless, on Thursday the association repeated its forecast made on July 7th that Germany’s winter barley, which is mainly used as animal feed, will rise from 8.7 million tons in the previous year to around 9.3 million tons in 2021.
Despite the bad weather, German farmers had harvested winter barley yields of 6.5 to 8.5 tons per hectare, which was in line with expectations, it said.
About half of the German winter barley had been harvested, but with enormous differences between the regions, it said.
“The changeable weather meant that the harvest was repeatedly interrupted,” said DBV President Joachim Rukwied.
In the northeast of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which largely escaped the storms, the barley harvest is almost complete. But in the southern regions of Bavaria and Saxony, 90% of winter barley is still in the fields, it said.
(Reporting by Michael Hogan, editing by Kirsten Donovan) (([email protected]; +49 172 671 36 54; Reuters Messaging: [email protected]))
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