Finland’s cereal stocks decrease

The 2021 cereal harvest totalled 2.6 million tons, being a quarter lower than the ten-year average, said the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) in a press release on Friday.

Barley is the most widely cultivated cereal in Finland, and its harvest was as much as a third, or roughly half a million tons, lower than average. The harvest was barely higher than a million tons. The majority of the harvest was consumed on farms for feeding animals.

As a result of the lower harvest, farms used cereal-based feed more diligently, and cereal stocks also decreased. Some 115,000 tons of barley were also imported into Finland.

Foreign trade in barley has usually flown in the other direction, as the barley harvest is normally higher than our consumption.

Domestic mills have for decades ground a little more than 400,000 tons of cereals for use in food production each year.

During the last couple of years, the use of cereals in food production has been increasing, being more than 470,000 tons during the 2021–2022 harvest year.

This trend has been driven by oats, as its grinding for food production passed rye during the 2016–2017 harvest year. Of the 2021 oat harvest, more than 150,000 tons were already consumed by the mill industry.

Instead, the use of rye has shown a slight downward trend, being about 80 million kilos during the previous harvest season.

However, the wheat production volume is higher than that of other cereals, with some 230,000 tons of wheat being used for production during the previous harvest year.

Finnish oats have claimed their place internationally, and more than 300,000 tons of the 2021 oat harvest of nearly 800,000 tons were exported. This is a fairly ordinary volume. Oat exports from Finland were the highest in 2019 at more than 430,000 tons.

Statistics monitor cereal stocks on farms and in industry and trade. According to estimates, their combined cereal stocks decreased by nearly 400,000 tons from June 2021 to June 2022.

The low harvest in 2021 reduced farms’ cereal stocks to a minimum before the new harvest.

As a result, barley and oat stocks are estimated to have decreased by some 150,000 tons from the previous year. Stockpiles in the cereal-using industries were at their lowest in more than a decade.