Drought burns Serbia's corn, price slips to 20.20 dinars

Drought has stripped the lower leaves off corn in Banat and southern Backa, and in the week ending August 1, 2026 the crop traded on the Novi Sad Commodity Exchange at 20.20 dinars per kilogram excluding VAT, 0.58 percent below the previous week. The crop is burning in the field while the market behaves as if nothing has happened: buyers held back, volumes shrank, the price came down.

What the heat wave did to corn and sugar beet

Goran Filipovic, a grower from Kisac in southern Backa, says the corn was heading for an unusually good yield before the heat arrived. Pollination went well and the ear was set. Then two lower leaves dried out over seven or eight days, and two more went in the last two days.

The corn has formed about 80 percent of the ear so far, but without rain it will not be able to fill the grain.

Eighty percent of the ear means the plant has done most of its work and only has to pump the kernels full of water and starch. That last step needs rain now, not in the second half of August.

In sugar beet fields the damage is visible from the roadside. Circles several meters across have appeared where both the leaf and the root are burned off, leaving nothing but holes in the soil. Sunflower, the growers say, is handling the dry spell better than the rest and is still in decent shape.

Why are Banat fields already being mulched under?

Because on part of that acreage the arithmetic is already settled. Dragan Kleut, a farmer from Banat, says high temperatures without rain are forcing corn to finish its growing cycle two months early. His verdict is short: “The leaf has burned right up to the ear and the harvest will be catastrophic.”

Mulching is the last move in that situation: a machine cuts and shreds the standing crop in the field and it gets ploughed back in as organic matter, because running a combine over it would cost more than the grain is worth. Doing that in the first days of August, six weeks before a normal harvest, is not a decision about this season. It is preparation for the next one.

The water exists, it just cannot reach the field

Jovica Jaksic from Bavaniste says irrigation pumps drawing from the Danube, Tisa, Danube canal system cannot run because the Danube has dropped too low. It is the same problem covered here in recent days from a different address: a river reading of minus 139, output at the Djerdap hydro plant down to roughly 20 percent of capacity, and warnings of water restrictions in August. One drought, measured in megawatts in one place and in tonnes per hectare in another.

The picture is not uniform across the country. Slobodan Vidojevic from Bresnica near Cacak says more rain fell on his land, his corn is in good condition and he has already cut alfalfa three times. The south is dry again: Zoran Stojanovic, a fruit grower from Rznj in the Nisava district, says the lower corn leaves are burned and that plums are drying on the branch before they ripen.

Thirteen tonnes per hectare is now history

A decade ago Serbian growers were pulling 13 to 14 tonnes of corn per hectare. In recent years they have not reached half of that. A bad season is no longer the exception that gets remembered, it repeats often enough to have moved into the average, and from there into the calculation of everyone who pays for inputs, fuel and rented land out of a corn crop.

The exchange moved down last week

The weekly report from the commodity exchange shows prices going the opposite way from what a heat wave of this size would suggest:

• corn: 20.20 dinars per kilogram excluding VAT, down 0.58 percent week on week
• wheat: a range of 20.00 to 20.30 dinars, averaging 20.03 dinars, down 1.39 percent
• soybeans: 53.50 dinars, the only gainer at 0.94 percent
• barley: 18.00 dinars, unchanged
• rapeseed: 54.60 dinars per kilogram

One corn contract was closed without an aflatoxin test, at 22.22 dinars including VAT. Aflatoxin is a mould toxin that attacks corn in hot, dry years, and testing for it routinely splits a crop into the part that can go into food and dairy feed and the part that cannot. A contract signed without that test is cheaper precisely because the risk stays with the buyer.

The price fell because buyers were not buying, not because there is a surplus sitting in storage. Those two conditions usually separate in August: once the first machines go into the corn and the tonnage per hectare is known, the market stops waiting. The next weekly exchange report will be the first one to put a figure on it.