ASTANA, Kazakhstan, November 7. The total harvested area of agricultural crops amounted to 24 million hectares in 2023, which is 652,000 more than in 2022, said Minister of Agriculture Aidarbek Saparov at a government meeting, Trend reports.
As he stated, grain harvesting is now complete in all regions of the country, with 16.9 million hectares harvested (98.7 percent).
"With an average yield of 9.7 c/ha, 16.4 million tons of grain in its original weight were threshed, including 11.4 million tons of wheat," the official stated.
Despite the adverse weather circumstances, Saparov estimates a gross grain harvest of 16 million tons. Taking carry-over balances of 3 million tons into consideration, this is adequate to fully provide the country with bread and wheat.
In addition, the minister noted that the country harvested 4.3 million tons of vegetable crops, 3.5 million tons of potatoes, and 1.6 million tons of oilseeds. Also, 747,500 tons of sunflowers were threshed. An additional 62,500 tons of preferential diesel fuel were allocated for drying grain and oilseeds.
The volume of gross agricultural output in Kazakhstan increased by 3.2 percent in the first half of 2023 and amounted to 2.1 trillion tenge (about $4.4 billion).
The growth was achieved mainly due to a 3.3 percent increase in livestock production volumes. Meat production increased by 4.5 percent (1 million tons in live weight) and milk production by 2.9 percent (3.2 million tons).
In 2022, the volume of gross agricultural production increased by 9.1 percent and amounted to 9.3 trillion tenge (about $19.5 billion). This happened due to an increase in crop production of 15 percent. Favorable weather conditions made it possible to carry out the harvesting campaign without downtime and harvest one of the best grain harvests in the last 10 years, which reached 22.8 million tons.
