The nightmare of agriculture and harvesting in a war zone

ZELENODILSK, Ukraine – Their uniforms are dusty jeans and tank tops, and they drive tractors, not tanks, along the first line in the Russian war in Ukraine.

But Ukrainian farmers face many of the same grave dangers as soldiers as they harvest this year’s crop.

All over Ukraine, Russian artillery and mines killed tractor drivers.

Thousands of hectares of ripe wheat were burned by the attacks.

The fields are marked where the shells have left craters.

Serhiy Sokol, a wheat, barley and sunflower farmer in southern Ukraine, said he and his workers have withdrawn from the black soil dozens of tubes aluminum from Russian rockets as they worked in their fields.

Last month, he said, a neighbor’s combine hit a mine, detonating one of his fat tires but saving the driver.

“There was a lot of cluster ammunition in the fields,” Sokol said with a shrug.

“We just took our chances and thank God no one was hurt.”

After all of Sokol’s troubles, with his barley crop drying in storage, a Russian artillery shell hit his silo.

A dozen tons of grain were burned.

The groundbreaking deal that allowed grain-carrying ships to leave southern Ukrainian ports this week may have solved a diplomatic problem, but left a more pragmatic one hanging over the Ukrainian farming community:

grow and harvest crops in a war zone, while powerful weapons spread destruction. on some of the richest farmland in the world.

Farmers say they have few options.

Much of Ukraine’s wheat crop is winter wheat and barley, sown in early autumn and harvested the following summer.

Having planted before the war began, farmers near the front now have to take risks don’t lose your investment throughout the year.

Ukraine is one of the largest grain exporting nations in the world and its profitable agricultural industry is the cornerstone of the country’s economy, accounting for around 11% of gross domestic product and creating around 1 million jobs.

Agriculture is even more important for export earnings, accounting for 41% of all Ukrainian exports last year.

But the Russians had hindered Ukraine’s export capacity, blocking sea routes in the Black Sea and, Ukraine says, stealing grain from the occupied territories.

Hopes for Ukrainian agriculture were raised this week when the first ship of grain, which was carrying 26,000 tons of cornleft the port of Odessa under a Turkish-brokered, United Nations-backed agreement aimed at alleviating hunger in developing countries.

Escorted Monday through sea mines protecting the port and Russian warships more offshore, the ship reached Turkish waters on Wednesday, where it was inspected and cleared to sail for Lebanon.

Other ships will follow.

The agreement is expected to allow the export of approximately 5 million tons of wheat per month, eliminating a accumulation from about 20 million tons largeor in last year’s silos, freeing up space for this year’s harvest.

But planting and harvesting have become such excruciating tasks that Ukraine will inevitably have less to export this year and in the future, given the obstacles to agriculture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, predicts that Ukraine’s grain exports, worth $ 5.1 billion last year, will drop to half after this year’s harvest.

In fields along a stretch of the front line where the Ukrainian army is pushing a counter-offensive against Russian forces, crops of sunflowers, wheat and barley stretch to the horizon.

This is the great sky of the Ukrainian countryside: huge expanses of land flat like a table, arranged on a chessboard of giant fields.

Closer to the front line, large Ukrainian military trucks plod along back roads, along with harvesting tractors and combines.

Every few minutes there is a distant thud from the artillery.

On the horizon, swirls of smoke blow in the wind from the burning fields.

Ukrainian peasants and soldiers claim that the Russian army is firing intentionally against ripe wheat and barley to start fires, as a form of economic sabotage.

There is also haphazard destruction, as Russian fire directed at military targets also risks setting camps ablaze.

“They see the reapers and shoot at them,” said Yevhen Sytnychenko, head of the military administration in the Kryvyi Rih district, who was interviewed next to a burning field on a recent tour of frontline farms.

“They do it so that we don’t have wheat, so we can’t eat and we can’t export,” said Sergeant Serhiy Tarasenko, whose soldiers with the 98th Infantry Brigade fought on farmland south of the city of Kryvyi Rih. He added that Russian artillery has targeted tractors and harvesters, which are detected by drones.

“They are shooting at the locals who are harvesting the grain,” he said.

“These are people who have invested their money and now they need to raise. But now they are doing it under fire, under attack ”.

For Ukrainians, burning fields are an emotionally charged and irritating result even in a war that is not without other outrages.

Sytnychenko recalls the Soviet Union’s grain requisitions in the 1930s that led to a famine that according to historians killed at least 3 million Ukrainians, a tragedy known as el Holodomor.

“They used to confiscate the wheat and now they burn it,” he said.

Ukraine is also facing immediate economic consequences.

The Ministry of Agriculture cited studies showing that the war will cost farmers and agri-food companies 23 billion dollars this year at a loss in profits, destroyed equipment and higher transport costs.

Ukrainian farmers and the government have adapted, finding solutions to blocked transport routes, setting up temporary sites to store grain, and trying to clear mines from fields to harvest crops.

The crops most affected are wheat, barley and sunflower, as they are grown in areas close to the fighting, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

“As Russia blackmails the world with hunger, we are trying to prevent a global food crisis,” the president said. Volodymyr Zelensky on efforts to maintain production on Ukrainian farms.

Destruction

Fires caused by artillery attacks are disrupting the harvest.

There have been more than 3,000 fires in the fieldaccording to Olena Kryvoruchkina, Member of Parliament.

Tractors and combine harvesters encountered mines in northern Ukraine even months after Russia’s withdrawal.

At the end of last month, for example, a tractor hit a mine on the outskirts of Kharkiv, killing the driver.

The tractor burned in the field.

Outside the hometown of Sokol in south-central Ukraine, two combines, including a John Deere operated by its neighbor, encountered mines during the last two weeks of July.

Rocket debris from the Sokol fields is now found in a courtyard along with tractor tires and sacks of grain.

A pile of a dozen dented slate gray tubes and fins leans against one wall.

“I’m angry,” he said.

“How angry? I want them to die. That’s how I feel right now. “

In the fields on a recent muggy afternoon during harvest, flames crackled through the stubble of Vasyliy Tabachnyuk’s freshly harvested wheat crop, rising with gusts of wind.

Tabachnyuk, whose fields are a few kilometers from the front, said he was lucky to have it collected in advance.

After previous attacks, he sent tractor drivers into burning fields to create firebreaks, trying to save as much grain as he could.

An attack burned about 80 hectares of ripe wheat.

If the Ukrainian counteroffensive does not push the Russians back before the winter wheat planting season in September, he said, I would not sow for the next year.

“All agriculture will fail,” he said, standing in the burnt field, where the ground was covered with charred grains.

“The wheat was ripe,” he said.

“Should have been collected.”