What awaits the gardening of the Kuban in 2021

After several years of intensive and successful development of horticulture in the Krasnodar Territory, the past year was marked by a sharp drop in yield due to natural disasters. Many farms, especially farms, are experiencing great economic difficulties. What awaits the Kuban gardening this year, what are fruit producers hoping for and how do they plan to build the economy? Nikolay Shcherbakov, General Director of the Union of Gardeners of the Kuban, told us about this and many other things.
The pouring apple is not born

- Nikolai Alekseevich, what are the results of the past year in gardening, how many fruits did you manage to collect?

- Frankly, the results in the industry did not please us, but at the same time they could be even worse than we expected at the beginning of the year. There has not been such a difficult year in terms of weather conditions for thirty years. At the very peak of flowering, the gardens were subjected to the most severe April frosts. Five waves of return cold weather had an extremely negative effect on the future harvest. The air temperature at night fell in some areas to 9-11 degrees below zero. Because of this, stone fruit crops have lost 80 percent of their future harvest. These are plum, cherry plum, apricot, cherry, sweet cherry, peach. And pome crops froze on 60 percent of the area. It's basically an apple. 19 thousand hectares of gardens were damaged.

At the end of April, the governor of the region declared a state of emergency in 15 municipalities. It was already clear that one could not count on another decent harvest. Autumn will be very difficult and gardeners will need help to stay afloat.

- And what did the autumn show, how many fruits were harvested?

- We expected a decrease in yield by at least two times. Instead of almost 383 thousand tons of fruit from the 2019 harvest, we hoped to get half of this volume. I would also like to say that a severe drought was added to the spring frosts, as well as hail on some farms. Especially in the foothill part of the region. In the Abinsky district, for example, in the Svetlogorskoye farm, as well as in Bryukhovetsky, Timashevsky and other districts.

Due to the lack of water, the famous "Giant Garden" of the Slavyansk region was badly damaged. The Protoka River became shallow to such an extent that it became problematic to use its water for drip irrigation, and, as a result, the yield decreased by more than 30 percent only from a lack of moisture. And the quality of the fruit suffered. Some of them turned out to be non-standard. Figuratively speaking, this time we didn't get enough apples.

Everything fell into a heap: the April frosts, and the most severe drought, and hail. But still, even in such difficult conditions, instead of the expected 200 thousand tons of fruit, it was possible to collect about 300 thousand tons. Gardeners intensively used mineral supplements, which were quickly absorbed by plants. Gardens of the intensive type turned out to be more frost-resistant. When the frosts receded and the primrose died, new productive flowers appeared on the annual shoots in some varieties. This is how trees react to stressful situations. There are varieties of apple trees that have the ability to partially recover from such disasters. These are, for example, "reneti simirenko", "novella", "florina" and others. They are especially widely practiced in new intensive gardens. All this, to a certain extent, made it possible to partially reduce the loss of yield.
Compensation failed

- In one of our interviews you said that you count on state support from the federal budget. What happened in the end?

- All the past years we have received unprecedented state support, including from the administration of the Krasnodar Territory. But I want to note that this is targeted money that goes to the establishment of young gardens. In recent years - 800 million rubles each. Slightly more than 70 percent of this amount is money from the federal budget, the rest from the regional budget. This allows the planting of up to 2 thousand hectares of new modern gardens annually. This year, the amount of state support due to the pandemic will be slightly lower, but the development of horticulture will continue to continue. For these purposes, 700 million rubles are provided, they will be a good help for our gardeners. I am sure that this year, as well as in the past, we will retain our leadership in Russia in terms of the rate of development of horticulture. For example, last year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture of Russia, our region became one of the subjects with the highest rates of laying modern intensive gardens. We have laid over 1,700 hectares.