Ukrainian farmers persevere for 2022 planting

Ukraine has shifted from input-dependent crops like corn towards the country’s more traditional sunflowers and small grains, as farmers there have persevered through an unimaginably difficult 2022 planting season to complete a significant portion of planned acreage.

That’s according to two Ontario seed-sector leaders whose companies have for several years done considerable business in Ukraine.

Why it matters: Ukraine’s ability to export its vast crops affects global markets, and demand for Canadian crops.

Clinton-based CanGro Genetics and Guelph-based North American Plant Genetics (NAPI) both plan to resume business in the region as soon as it’s feasible, despite suffering large financial losses due to the invasion.

Two shipping containers of foundation corn seed from NAPI – destined for Ukraine, where it was scheduled to be grown out on seed farms to supply 2023 growers – were in the Mediterranean Sea when the invasion precipitated the closure of all Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea.

“The timing was very bad,” reported CEO Clare Cowan, adding that containers ultimately returned to Canada. “We’ve taken a pretty big hit this year.”

CanGro, meanwhile, would in a typical year already have shipped their Canadian-grown, non-GMO soybean seed to customers in Ukraine and Russia by the end of January. But 2022, with its shipping container backlog due largely to Chinese anti-COVID-19 measures, was far from typical. By the time Russia invaded in late February, only one shipment had been transported by boat to the Ukrainian port of Odesa and overland to an elevator in Poland owned by the Canadian company.

“It certainly hits financially right now,” says CanGro General Manager Martin Harry. “We didn’t have any sales of seed that we had expected.” It also affects future profitability because the company won’t be able to work with partner farms to grow next year’s seed in Ukraine. “You take a year out of the system,” Harry explained.

Like so many business people with dealings in Ukraine, neither Cowan nor Harry has had future profitability as their main priority since the Russians invaded. They’re worried more about their friends and colleagues in the eastern European nation.

In both cases, partner farmers and employees in the conflict zones are, as far as the Canadians know, still safe. “Everybody is safe that I have worked with and that I know there,” Harry told Farmtario.

CanGro’s Ukrainian sales manager Vladimir Zinchenko – whose photo holding a machine gun as he volunteered in defense of his homeland was featured recently in North American farm media – was last week back on the job seeing seed customers. The hostilities are no longer in the region where he lives on the outskirts of Kyiv. His family, including his wife and young child, have rejoined him because they don’t want to leave him alone.

Likewise, with NAPI’s partner farmers outside active conflict zones, life has shifted towards a semblance of normality. Cowan said her seed grower representative hosted a silage workshop to talk to dairy farmers about feeding cattle. Numerous webinars and live stream events are planned.

“I don’t hear from our partners that often because they’re very busy,” she said. “In a lot of ways, it’s farming as usual,” with particular challenges emerging within any given growing season that require last-minute changes to plans.

It’s just that in 2022, those challenges stem from Russian military assaults.

Cowan gleans much information through Ukrainian agricultural news services, running the Cyrillic script on the websites through the Google’s translate app to learn the latest updates.

“The Russians have also stolen a lot of grain,” she noted. “And I’m not just saying that because it’s a rumour in Ukraine. It’s internationally recognized.”

One Ukrainian news agency estimated 400,000 tonnes had been stolen through the Russian-occupied port of Sebastopol via vessels registered in Russia and Syria. Satellite tracking devices on the vessels are scrambled while on the open sea but they must be turned back on when entering Turkish waters, through which they must pass to exit the Black Sea. A small portion of the grain was confirmed as off-loaded in Syria. Both Egypt and Turkey, meanwhile, have rejected Russian offers of sale of grains from the ships suspected of holding stolen Ukrainian commodities.

Remarkably, given the challenges, Cowan reports, “planting in Ukraine is well underway and starting to wrap up in some regions.” Even in regions where there is conflict, some seeding has gone forward.

The big driver in the shift away from corn is the lack of access to fertilizer.

According to Harry, who before COVID-19 typically visited Ukraine four times per year, “the bigger players that I deal with, they all brought in their inputs last fall,” so they generally have enough in storage to get themselves through this growing year. But these larger operators often sell inputs to the smaller farmers, and there isn’t enough inventory in the country to supply all the smaller farmers.

A secondary driver in shifting cropping decisions is a concern about logistics at harvest. Cowan says an existing rail line, which had not generally been used to haul agricultural commodities, is now in use moving some grain into western Europe. “They are prioritizing rail for grain.” But it’s just a trickle compared to what was formerly loaded out of Black Sea ports.

“Fuel shortages are a challenge; crop protection shortages are a challenge,” she says. The most recent estimate is that the country’s farm sector has about 75 per cent of its 2022 crop protection requirements. That was a big jump, though, over the estimate Cowan heard previously. A ship destined for Ukraine but trapped in Turkey eventually had product off-loaded and brought overland.

Labour shortages are also a challenge. Food production workers are exempt from military service but many chose to serve anyway.

Infrastructure damage is a factor. One farmer hosting research plots for CanGro has reverted to the core aspects of his farming business and cut back on total plantings from 60,000 hectares to 40,000 hectares. It doesn’t make sense to transport equipment and inputs to farms that are further away; in some cases, road damage means they simply can’t get to the farms.

“Some farmers have chosen not to plant,” added Cowan. “They have full storage bins and they don’t want to grow a new crop and have no place for it to go.”

Finally, after COVID, Harry was looking forward to travelling again to Ukraine and Russia. Even before this most recent invasion, relations were tenuous between the two nations – a fact not lost on Harry.

CanGro’s Russian customer lives only about four hours away by vehicle from his Ukrainian counterparts. But when Harry first suggested to the Ukrainians that he drive across the border, laughter was the response. Since Russia’s 2014 military annexation of the Ukrainian-held Crimean peninsula, civilian border-crossing has been non-existent.

Instead, the journey to the Russian customer included a combination of flights and took 24 hours to complete.

Harry yearns for a day when farmers on both sides of the border can return to simply worrying about the weather and which crop pests will threaten this year. The Russians, he noted, “are good people. We have a lot of trust in them and faith in them.”

And Ukraine “is a beautiful country. Beautiful history and beautiful cities. I just don’t even want to think about what has been done to it.”