Russia’s Impact on Agriculture [Wheat]

What’s the Sphynx’ favorite food? Apparently, it’s wheat from Russia! Egypt’s purchases of Russian foods such as wheat and sunflower oil jumped 44 percent to $1.74 billion last year, according to Bloomberg.

Russian wheat is attracting a lot of attention these days! In fact, Russia is now the world’s largest exporter of wheat. While the U.S. produced 63 million metric tons of wheat in 2017, Russia grew 72.5 MMT. That was a 20% increase in Russia’s production from the previous year! Think about all of those baguettes (or pitas…)!

The global appetite for Russian wheat has partly been driven by low crude oil prices, which have depressed the ruble — and thus the wheat price.

What does this have to do with satellites and machine learning?

At Telluslabs, we want to help our subscribers see the whole game board. That means they need to know how each of the major producing countries is doing. That’s why we’re generating the first ever satellite and weather-derived predictive models for Russian production.

Right now, our data scientists are collecting as much data as possible on 15 years of Russian wheat harvests. Their models and metrics will provide detail down to the “oblast” (state) level.

Here is a screenshot of our product Kernel. Within our platform, we will also be forecasting production of Russian corn, as well as Ukraine Wheat, Corn and Soy! (More on that in a future post…)

Curious about our current models? Get access to our free Kernel trial!