Kazakhstan's grains harvest is so big that the country is resorting to rail wagons for storage, a leading businessman said, as officials signalled the crop may set beat records even more convincingly than had been thought.
Kees Vrins, former boss at Allseeds, the Ukrainian oilseeds crusher bought by rival Kernel nearly two years ago, said that the neighbouring Black Sea country had been forced by a huge harvest, and a shortage of export logistics, to consider a range of alternative means for storage, including lorries on laybys.
"Kazakhstan is using rail trucks to store wheat," Mr Vrins told an agribusiness conference.
"There is a large amount of wheat in Kazakhstan, but they do not know how it will get to ports, and when."
Kazakhstan, a landlocked country, has historically used ports in neighbouring Russia to ship its grain.
But Russia's logistics are struggling to deal with its own strong harvest, and rapid start to exports in 2011-12.
Huge harvest
The comments came as Asylzhan Mamytbekov, the Kazakh agriculture minister, said that the country had reaped 28.2m tonnes of grain by bunker weight - before cleaning and drying – with 99% of harvesting completed.
With bunker weight typically 8-10% higher in the country than the more widely used clean weight figure, the data suggest a final result of potentially 26m tonnes, trouncing the current post-Soviet record of 20.8m tonnes, set two years ago.
Mr Mamytbekov has previously forecast a 2011 grains harvest of 22m-23m tonnes.
The US Department of Agriculture, whose estimates set world benchmarks, last weeklifted its estimate for the Kazakh wheat harvest, the vast majority of grains output, by 3m tonnes to 19m tonnes, citing "abundant moisture and near-perfect summer weather".
Logistics issue
Mr Vrins, who is restarting Allseeds, stressed the importance of transport capacity even in Ukraine, whose ports were going to be running at full tilt just to cope with corn exports, after a record 17.5m-tonne harvest.
"That is going to keep ports busy for the next four-to-five months," he told the INTL FCStone Commodity Outlook Conference.
"Why would they export oilseeds when they can carry corn? That's why you need your own ports."
Transport infrastructure was also important in guaranteeing quality – an increasingly important factor, as Ukraine had highlighted three years ago in a scandal of contamination of vegetable oils with mineral oils, leading to a ban on exports to the European Union.
"Your logistics are becoming more and more key."
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