Юг Украины становится регионом, благоприятным для выращивания хлопчатника. Південь України стає регіоном, сприятливим для вирощування бавовнику The south of Ukraine is becoming a region favorable for growing cotton

Climatic changes have led to the creation of favorable conditions for growing cotton in Ukraine. And earlier in the south of Ukraine in the 1950s, the cotton cultivation program failed. This happened precisely because of the lack of heat.

As Tetyana Adamenko, head of the agrometeorology department of the Hydrometeorological Center, noted, for normal ripening, this crop must receive active temperatures of at least 3,600°C during the growing season, but it was colder in those days. Even in the Kherson region and the Crimea, the southernmost regions of Ukraine, the cotton plant managed to gain a maximum of 3000°C. Therefore, due to poor quality and low yield, farmers were forced to abandon this direction. But currently the southern regions of Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia regions belong to the thermal zones with the sum of temperatures from 3400°C to 3700°C.

This is due to the fact that the last 20 years in Ukraine have been an almost continuous period of warming. During this time, there was only one year in which the average temperature approached the climatic norm. In all other years, actual temperatures rose and significantly exceeded the norm. In particular, in 2023 the average annual temperature in the country was +10.8°C, which is +3°C (almost a third) higher than the climatic norm. It was in Odesa, where the first cotton fields were sown, that the average temperature last year reached +12.4°C. This indicator is only 1.5°C less than it was in the fields near Tashkent 40 years ago, when Uzbekistan was already a world-famous center for growing cotton.