This analysis covers the harvesting period of last year’s summer crops (cereals, spring barley, and wheat) from October 2014 to late January of this year. Among the CropWatch agro-climaticindicators, compared with average, rainfall over agricultural areas showed a sharp increase (+41%) (with the exception of the Zapadno kazachstans kayaoblast where rainfall decreases by 10%), while temperature and radiationunder go slight (-0.8°C for TEMP) and sharp (-8% for PAR) decreases. The NDVI clusters indicate that crops were in poor condition from October to earlyNovember in the areas of Severo kazachstanskaya and Akmolinskaya. The maximumVCI indicates that crop condition of most arable land in Kazakhstan was belowaverage (pixel values below 0.5), except for some areas of the north and east. Nocrop was planted since November, and from December the NDVI index has been closeto zero. The crop condition development graph also shows that crops are clearlyworse off than last year and the average of the past five years,but favorable rainfall has provided the soil moisture for theinitial stages of the forthcoming crops.

Figure3.18. Kazakhstan crop condition, October2014-January 2015