Penza, 5 June 2014. PenzaNews. Around 100 thousand hectares of unused agricultural land will be put in croprotation in the Penza region in 2014.

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As the press service of the Ministry of Agriculture of the region told news agency “PenzaNews,” since the beginning of the year nearly 25 thousand hectares were put into circulation.

“Total area of unused agricultural land is 484 thousand hectares,” the agency commented.

Currently the work on putting cropland into circulation in carried out in all areas of the Penza region.

Thus, in Mokshansky area over five 5 thousand hectares have been processed.

“Basically, fallow land is owned by investors from St. Petersburg and other regions. They bought the land shares, laid them in the bank and do not use them,” the head of the department of agricultural development of the administration of Mokshansky area Valery Dolzhenkov explained.

He added that currenty they hold negotiations with several companies to let the land for a long-term lease.

According to Valery Dolzhenkov, the increase of acreage has a number of advantages, including job creation and the ability to collect additional yield.

In turn, the director of “Kamenkoe” agricultural enterprise Lyudmila Glukhova noted that the land cannot be sown immediately.

“We uproot trees, shrubs. First domestic machinery process the land, then the foreign one pulverizes the soil. There are a lot of weeds, so we put the land into circulation using graded tilling. We use 2-3 disking to make the soil more or less decent,” she said.

Lyudmila Glukhova added that these plots of land will be planted with sunflower in spring, which will further purify the soil.