Russia's domestic seed share reaches 69.3% as substitution loses momentum

Russia's effort to replace imported crop seed with domestically bred material has lost momentum, Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut said at the All-Russian Forum of Breeders and Seed Growers “Russkoe Pole” in Kazan. Domestic seed accounted for 69.3% of Russian crop farming in 2025, against a state target of 75% by 2030.

“We have slowed down a bit, it is clearly visible,” Lut said of work on new varieties and hybrids, in remarks reported by zol.ru. “We are now moving onto a plateau, where it will be rather hard to advance further in terms of the efficiency of our seeds.”

Annual gain cut to a third of the previous pace

According to the minister's presentation cited by zol.ru, the domestic share rose by 1.7 percentage points in 2025 from 67.6% in 2024. A year earlier the increase had been 5.1 percentage points, which implies a base of about 62.5% in 2023. The direction of travel is unchanged, but the annual gain has fallen to roughly a third of the previous pace.

• 2024: 67.6% domestic seed, up 5.1 percentage points year on year
• 2025: 69.3%, up 1.7 percentage points
• 2030: 75% required under Russia's food security doctrine

That leaves 5.7 percentage points to cover in five seasons, an average of just over 1.1 points a year — less than the 2025 gain, and far less than the 2024 one. Just under a third of seed use still sits outside the domestic category as the ministry counts it.

Breeding as an interdisciplinary task

Lut argued that cooperation is the way past the slowdown. “We need to move towards cooperation. Where previously the creation of a variety or a hybrid was a separate, relatively narrow field, now it is interdisciplinary activity,” she said. “That is why we have to cooperate across different areas, so that there is speed.”

The minister acknowledged that her timelines are contested. “I am often criticised for saying that we need to come out with new varieties and hybrids in two or three years. Many sceptics say seven to ten years is normal, it has always been that way. But if we live like that, we will fall behind everyone. And we will have no seeds of our own.” The wider the geography used for simultaneous trials of each development, she added, the faster breeders can arrive at both broad adaptability and site-specific performance.

Shared-use centres and the Vavilov cluster

Lut stressed that cooperation has to run on mutually beneficial terms and pointed to the shared-use centres being set up in Russia. “Shared-use centres are our key task,” she said, citing the Vavilov cluster, where conditions have been created for developing new varieties and hybrids. The cluster currently has only 15 residents. “That is very few, more need to come in, this is very important,” she said. “The centre should be used to cut research costs while still getting a result.”

A comparable centre for livestock breeding, Genbiotekh, is due to open in Kazan shortly. Lut also pointed to PUSK, the accelerated plant breeding platform established at the Timiryazev Academy, which brings together 86 participants — research and educational institutions under both the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education — with the aim of developing new varieties and hybrids and bringing them to market faster.

What the 2030 target requires

The 75% threshold is set by Russia's food security doctrine, making seed self-sufficiency a formal policy metric rather than a commercial preference. Meeting it now depends on the segments where domestic material has been least competitive, precisely the ones the minister described as a plateau in efficiency.

No crop-by-crop breakdown of the 69.3% figure was reported, and no timeline was given for expanding the number of residents in the shared-use centres. The immediate policy lever on offer is organisational — pooled facilities, joint trials across a wider geography and shorter development cycles — rather than additional restrictions on imported genetics.