<
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/ukraine-grain-harvest-00107212>
"ODESA, Ukraine — July begins the Ukrainian wheat harvest, and the stalks from
the humus-saturated soil near the Black Sea are chest-high and golden. A
20-minute car ride separates the port city of Odesa from wheat fields that,
aside from a line of low trees, extend north and east without visible end. The
only natural sound is a loud whisper the wind elicits every minute or so from
the expanse of grain.
But it isn’t a time of plenty in the breadbasket of Europe, and not only
because Russia, for now, says it won’t continue the arrangement it made with
the United Nations and Turkey that for a year permitted 32 million tons of
Ukrainian grain to be exported from the country’s massive southern ports. The
present war has stunted Ukraine’s grain industry at every stage, beginning
months before harvest time.
Though blessed with an abundance of wheat-friendly chernozem — the Russian term
for “black earth” — most Ukrainians fertilize their soil. “There’s a great
shortage of nitrogen fertilizers,” says Denis Tkachenko, who helps run a trade
association of Odesa region farms including about 12,000 acres. Fertilization
means more grain enriched with the proteins enabling wheat to be baked into
bread; poorer crops can be sold more cheaply for animal feed.
Before the war, Russia was a large exporter of fertilizer and also of ammonium,
which is essential to the fertilizers used by farmers like those Tkachenko
represents. Ukraine has some capacity to synthesize fertilizer for itself, but
two of its major fertilizer plants are now controlled by Russia. The price of
fertilizer shot up after the February 2022 invasion (and Russia’s temporary
decision not to export any of its own) and has since come down, but not enough,
Tkachenko says, for farmers to afford enough for every field.
And there are many fewer fields. More than a quarter of Ukraine’s grain country
lies east of the Dnieper River, and has been controlled or threatened by Russia
since the February 2022 invasion. Even in the relatively safe southwest, the
Ukrainian military has commandeered — thereby disabling — a lot of farmland.
Tkachenko says that about 3 to 5 percent of the fields in his region were
fortified early in the war against a possible Russian sea invasion. Another
farmer in the area tells me that a third of his nearly 10,000 acres have been
used for trenches, mining and the like."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
