Talk:Altai Krai (growing region)

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Page scope

Altai Krai (growing region) is a Growing Region: a named region that sits above Growing Areas and below the regional complex and gene pool. It covers Altai Krai in southern Siberia: the wild hemp found there and the hemp sown as a crop. The krai as an administrative unit is the subject of Altai Krai; the Altai Republic, to the south-east, is not part of the region.

Data verification

Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the boundary, the districts the region takes in, and the accessions and news items that belong to it here.

Discussion

Why the region is on the map

Since 2000, reports of wild hemp in the krai name districts and give areas. Sergei Lavrov, head of the krai's drug-control service, said in 2005 that every one of the service's ten inter-district offices had hemp growing in its area (Amitel, 13 July 2005). Students of the krai's squads cleared patches in Pervomaysky and Pavlovsky districts and at Kamen-na-Obi (Atmosfera, 21 August 2010); the drug-control service said Pervomaysky District was chosen first because it had the most wild hemp in the krai (Amitel, 24 June 2010). Rosselkhoznadzor found 16 patches on 1.9 hectares of farmland in Tabunsky District (Altapress, 15 August 2016) and new patches in six districts and the town of Slavgorod in September 2026 (Rosselkhoznadzor, 2 October 2026) and in six districts in October 2026 (Rosselkhoznadzor, 21 October 2026). The krai's anti-drug commission counted 352.42 hectares in 1,223 patches for 2025 (Altapress, 24 September 2026).
Ovcharova and Terekhina (2009, 2012) found an almost pure stand of hemp on a disused livestock camp at Kontoshino, Kosikhinsky District, in 2007, and followed it to 2011.
Seven sheets in the herbarium of Altai State University were gathered at Lake Krasilovo, in the same district, in the summers between 1976 and 1995 (GBIF, dataset "Virtual Herbarium ALTB (South-Siberian Botanical Garden)"): 2443044816 (1976, Konova), 2443046376 (1978, Silkova), 2443044871 (1983, Proskurina), 2443044159 (1989, no collector given), 2443044952 (1989, Solovyova), 2443044137 (1995, Petrova) and 2443044550 (1995, Kameneva, Kudinova and Fatova). The page cites the first and the last.
Shmakov, Kutsev, Vaganov, Kechaykin and Kostyukov (2008) list hemp along roads and round settlements in the Zalesovsky reserve, on the Salair Ridge.
Hemp has been grown as a crop: among the krai's most important industrial crops in the late 1960s, with flax and hemp mills (Great Soviet Encyclopedia); actively in the 1960s (Sibnet, 16 May 2012); on Aleksandr Kapelkin's farm in Kytmanovsky District from 2012 (Sibnet 2012; Altapress, 16 August 2017); in 2017 (Omsk Biocluster, 30 October 2017); and on a farm in Kalmansky District in 2024 and 2025 (Altapress, 29 July 2026).

The name

The sources report hemp by the krai and by its districts. None of them names a landscape within the krai, such as the Kulunda steppe or the Ob plateau, as a place where hemp grows, so the region takes the krai's name. The words "(growing region)" in the title keep it apart from the page on the krai itself.

Growing status

The status is Active. Reports of wild hemp run from 2005 to 2026, and hemp was sown as a crop from 2012 to 2017 and in 2024 and 2025. No source says that hemp has stopped growing in the krai. Reports of destruction are not read as an end to growing.

How the border is drawn

The border is a proxy drawn on the whole of Altai Krai (OpenStreetMap relation 144764), about 168,000 km², because the sources report hemp by the krai and by districts spread across it. Encyclopædia Britannica gives the krai's area as 169,100 km².
The infobox point (52.61, 82.61) is the centre of the shape.
The border is not drawn from accession or news points.
Since October 2026 the map line leaves out ground above 4,000 m (SRTM elevation) and land that ESA WorldCover 2021 maps as bare or sparse vegetation, permanent snow and ice, or open water at its outer edge only, and leaves out lakes of 500 km² or more. Along the krai's boundary that ground comes to less than half of one per cent of the land, so the line keeps to the boundary; Lake Kulunda, about 720 km², stays outside it. The Ob and the rivers that feed it are inside the line, which encloses about 167,300 km².

Accessions

No accession is attached to the region. The sheet MW0062830 (Biysky District, 1990), cited on the page, has no accession page.

Where the sources disagree

Ovcharova and Terekhina (2009) say that the livestock camp at Kontoshino had not been used for five years when it carried the hemp stand of 2007; their paper of 2012 says that it had not been used for three years when the observations began, and that the stand formed in the fourth year. The page gives the 2007 stand and the fourth-year stand without the length of disuse.
Altapress (24 September 2026) gives the number of patches found in the first stage of 2026 as "2448,9", a figure with a fraction; the page says only that the number was almost twice that of 2025, as the article does.

Sources

Rosselkhoznadzor (Office for Altai Krai and the Altai Republic), press releases of 2 October 2026 (six districts and Slavgorod, 10,783 square metres, found while surveying for invasive plants) and 21 October 2026 (six districts and 31,844.44 square metres); the positions of the patches went to the regional police.
Altapress (15 August 2016; 16 August 2017, a column by Anna Nedobitkova; 29 July 2026; 24 September 2026), Atmosfera (21 August 2010), Amitel (13 July 2005; 24 June 2010) and Sibnet (16 May 2012, from Vesti.Ru): news reports in Russian. In the 2005 report the comparison of the krai's hemp with that of the Altai Republic and Tuva is the reporter's summary of what Lavrov and Vedernikov thought; the words about sibirka hemp are Vedernikov's own.
Ovcharova and Terekhina (2009, 2012): field studies of meadow recovery in Kosikhinsky District on the Biysk–Chumysh upland, by botanists of Altai State University. Shmakov and co-authors (2008), Флора и растительность Алтая: the flora of the Zalesovsky reserve.
Omsk Biocluster (30 October 2017), from agrarii.com: the five Russian regions where hemp was grown.
Encyclopædia Britannica, "Altay" (kray), and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd edition), "Алтайский край": geography; the Soviet article describes the krai of its time, which then included the present Altai Republic.
Moscow Digital Herbarium: sheet MW0062830. GBIF: the seven Lake Krasilovo sheets of the herbarium of Altai State University (ALTB).

Not used

The Vavilov Institute holds local hemps whose origin is given as "Altai" (Grigoryev 2018). The label does not say whether the krai or the Altai Republic is meant.
The herbarium of Altai State University holds sheets of hemp from many other districts of the krai (1976–2008), with a place, a collector and a date and no note on habitat. Only the seven Lake Krasilovo sheets are cited.
Encyclopædia Britannica lists hemp among the krai's crops without a date or an area.

Open questions

Whether the Biysk–Chumysh upland, round Kontoshino and Lake Krasilovo, is a growing tract of its own is not settled by one field study and one series of herbarium sheets. The sheets show where collectors gathered hemp over twenty years, not how much of it grew there.
Whether the districts on the Kulunda steppe, in the west of the krai, have a hemp history of their own.