Grain price through the roof: growing Dutch grain ‘more interesting by the day’
Potatoes, sugar beets, onions and grain. Arable farmer Ron Bastiaanse grows various crops on his plot in Dordrecht. Until now he used the grain as a change crop. To keep the soil good and avoid depletion, plant a different crop every year. Wheat is a dormant crop that restores the soil.
It yielded little financially for him, roughly 250 euros per ton until March 2022. After that, the price exploded on the world market. A lot of grain came from Ukraine, but exports have come to a standstill due to the war. The grain price rose to 385 euros per tonne in May.
He now falls to sow more grain. “It’s a bit of a gamble for me as a farmer. Look at what the world trade is doing and what the situation in Ukraine is affecting the cultivation there,” he says.
More candidates
“Due to the high grain price, more farmers are considering growing grain,” says Jurriaan Visser, grain manager of agricultural cooperative CZAV. “You can sow grain once a year. You will have to make a choice in the autumn this summer.”
CZAV expects that the area, the surface area of grain in the Netherlands, will increase by 5 to 10 percent grain. “It also depends on demand and what happens to the price of other crops. What is the most produced? If many farmers switch, there will be fewer sugar beets and potatoes on the market and prices will also rise.”
Drought
For Bastiaanse, grain was also an aid crop to keep his land in good shape. “I think I’m going to grow less potatoes, onions or sugar beets now,” he says. The yield of grain has increased, but that cultivation also entails more costs. “It’s not that we get richer as farmers.”
No one knows how long the war in Ukraine will last. Even without this, the grain price will continue, Visser expects. “Prices were already rising before the war. Stocks are low worldwide, in India for example due to the extreme weather. In France, parts are dry and parts extremely wet.”
Experimenting with baking bread
Making tasty bread from Dutch grain is still a challenge, says baker Tom van Otterlo from Arnhem. He has been working with Dutch grain for fifteen years. At the large mills you will receive an A4 page with how to process the wheat. With the smaller suppliers, you as a baker have to find that out yourself.
“More from less water, more kneading or not. It depends on the hours of sunshine, the amount of rain. You have to start trial baking. Which harvest is the tastiest? Each harvest has a different quality.”
More homegrown grain
Van Otterlo uses more Dutch grain. “When we started in 2008 with 1 bag of 20 kilos in 4 weeks, now it is 160 to 180 kilos per week. And then we also use another 40 kilos of home-grown rye.”
Switching completely to Dutch grain is not possible. “We use 30,000 kilos of grain every four weeks from France. We have too little land in the Netherlands to be able to eat and live on.”
Less grain sown in Ukraine
Even if the war ends tomorrow, we will still have the last of the consequences, experts think. Ukrainian farmers have almost completed sowing this spring. But the area sown with grains, such as wheat, is more than a fifth smaller than last year, the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture reports.
The ministry did not give any forecast for this year’s grain harvest. Much of the grain remains in the country itself. And exports have fallen sharply as the Russian military blocks Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea.
hunger
Last week battle with Ukraine. By opening ports and destroying silos and railways in the Eastern European country, the Russian army is fueling a system of food crisis, established Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN also fears that millions of people are starving like Russia from Ukrainian hunger.