The Russian rocket went right through Yvan Kyrykovych’s combine harvester, exploding the upper part and leaving a long cylindrical hole in its innards. By exploding in June, it also destroyed a second combine harvester, and left a mass of shards on the ground that Yvan Kyrykovytch, black cap, round face and brush mustache, today sweeps away with the foot of a looking distracted.
Against all odds, this farmer from southern Ukraine has almost managed to finish his harvest. Of the 400 hectares of wheat, barley and sunflowers he cultivates, there are only 20 hectares of barley left not far from the front line. Twenty hectares that would have to be harvested “yesterday, ideally”he lets go with a contrite smile.
At the end of a deserted road lined with partly burnt tall grass, Zelenyï Haï, a village in southern Ukraine now 10 kilometers from the Russian positions, is today a bruised locality. In March, a bomb dropped by a Russian plane exploded in the village school, then transformed into a shelter, and killed eight people. On the other side of the road, Yvan Kyrykovytch’s farm was also hit multiple times.
Pulling out the tractor during lulls
The sheet metal walls of his shed beat gently in the wind, pierced with shrapnel shards. An explosion in mid-July ripped a hole wide enough for a car to pass through the brick wall of his warehouse. The skylight created by the opening only illuminates an old truck, a few bags of fertilizer and three dogs abandoned by residents who have fled the village. Towering in the middle of the farm, an imposing radio tower seems to be the only one to have been spared.
Even after leaving Zelenyï Haï in March, Yvan Kyrykovytch continued to work, going back and forth from Mykolaiv, the regional capital also regularly targeted by the Russian army. He waited for calm to take out his tractor with his two employees. Impossible to rent a combine harvester to replace the one that was destroyed: “The renters do not want to come here, near the front line”he says.
It was therefore necessary to buy one urgently and, between the roar of strikes in the distance and the fear of a new Russian offensive, begin the harvest. Unlike some of his neighbours, Yvan Kyrykovytch did not suffer a fire in his fields. “But, between bombed farms, unexploded ordnance in fields and fires, there is not a single farmer in the area who has not been affected in one way or another,” he confirms.
Abandoned fields
In southern Ukraine, the impact of war on crops is still best observed from space. On the satellite images thus appears a dark strip of ten kilometers on each side of the front line, which marks the fields left abandoned, too close to the fighting to be harvested. Somewhere in this area, several hundred hectares belong to Sergueï Kaouchane, until then a rather well-to-do farmer, for more than ten years a member of the municipal council of his village of Kiselivka.
He now lives in Nova Odessa, 60 kilometers further north, in a small house wedged at the end of a dead end between a road and a stream and left available by a soldier who has gone to the front. Surrounded by his wife and 15-year-old daughter, he recounts the past few months: the first hours of the Russian invasion marked by strikes on the nearby military airfield; the occupation of their house by officers of the Russian army; the freezing nights spent in a cellar as Ukrainian and Russian armies battled for control of the village; and finally, at the end of March, their escape.
” I lost everything “
Kiselivka has since been taken over by the Ukrainian army. But the village is only a few hundred meters from a front line that now crosses the fields of Sergei Kaouchane. “I spoke to my tractor driver yesterday. It had been two months since I had managed to get it. He told me that all my fields have burned”he says sadly.
Behind him, the black 4 × 4 left for repair in Mykolaiv, before the start of the war, is all he has left. His fields burned, his house, his farm and solar panels installed last year were destroyed. “I had stocks of sunflower seeds that burned for a month” he recalls, before concluding simply: ” I lost everything. »
The complicated fates of Ukrainian farmers are worrying far beyond the front line, as the war could, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, result in Ukrainian grain exports halving compared to Last year. In Odessa, Ukraine’s main port on the Black Sea, Shota Khadzhishvili, CEO of Risoil, one of the country’s leading sunflower oil exporters, fears the future.
“I have two fearshe explains in his imposing office saturated with the smell of cold tobacco. In the short term, find out if I will be able to release my products. And in the longer term, I fear that farmers will not get enough money this year and decide not to sow as much next year. If this happens, the problem for one year will turn into a problem for the next two or three years. »
An offensive could liberate the lands of the South
The July 22 agreement, under the aegis of the UN, for the partial reopening of Ukrainian ports was not enough to reassure him. “I don’t trust the Russians, loose Sergei Kaouchane, I’m afraid they’ll open fire on a convoy of ships. »
Yvan Kyrykovytch managed to sell 50 tons of wheat, sent to the port of Reni, on the banks of the Danube. But he is hesitant about the rest of his harvest. Prices have collapsed “85 dollars per ton against 240 dollars last year”, he counts. Under these conditions, should you sell now? Or bet on a rise in prices helped by the partial opening of Ukrainian ports? “It’s 50/50, maybe prices will go up, maybe not. »
In the shorter term, Yvan Kyrykovytch and hundreds of other farmers also continue to wonder about the sowing of winter wheat, which should start in a few weeks. “We haven’t decided anything yet. he raises. We will wait two weeks, see the evolution of the front line. If things don’t move and we stay less than 20 kilometers from the fighting… we’re ready to take risks, but we’re not suicidal. »
Sergei Kaouchane is also waiting for a hypothetical Ukrainian counter-offensive which would liberate Kherson and put his village out of reach of Russian artillery. “We dream of it, he breathes, because, in the end, we just want to go home. »
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Ukraine, an agricultural giant
41.5 million hectares : this is the useful agricultural area of Ukraine, according to a note from the management of the Treasury in 2021, which makes it the largest agricultural country on the European continent. Most of it is “black earth”, some of the most fertile soil in the world.
15% you PIB of the country are generated by agriculture and agri-food, which employ 20% of the active population and represent 40% of the country’s exports.
15% of world barley exports come from Ukraine, as well as 16 to 18% of corn or rapeseed. This is also the case for half of sunflower oil exports, as well as 60% of sunflower meal…
324,000 tons : this is the quantity of organic products exported to the European market in 2019, making Ukraine its second largest supplier.