Grain Pains
November 9th, 2010Via: Foreign Policy:
LB: While the heat wave in Russia reduced their grain harvest — and I’ll use round numbers and say from 100 million tons to 60 million tons, so they lost 40 million tons — it could have been much worse.
If that heat wave had been centered in Chicago, we would have lost at least 150 million tons of grain, maybe 200 million tons of grain. If the temperature of Chicago had been 14 degrees above normal during July, there would be chaos in world grain markets.
That’s because the area around Chicago is such an exceptional piece of agricultural real estate. Just to give you an example of how productive it is, the U.S. state of Iowa produces more grain than Canada.
Russia is much more like Canada. It’s relatively low rainfall, it’s pretty far north, and you’re growing wheat not corn, so yields are not very high. Even when you’re using the most productive technologies and inputs and so forth, you don’t get very high yields in either Canada or Russia.
Research Credit: JH
