Farmer Case

This morning we visited a dutch farmer ‘Case’. Case has been farming in Ukraine for 10 years and has achieved so much. Today he farms 15,000 ha’s and runs 400 head of cattle. Value adding your crops is important in Ukraine, because of the risk of export bans. So he plans to expand the dairy herd to 10,000. 4 new sheds to be built to house 2500 cows each.The sky is the limit!! We had a look around the dairy, and the silage that they are making out of corn and lucerne, which will provide for the whole dairy. We then headed out to visit various properties, which were spread far and wide because of the different landholdings that farmers have to lease off smaller land owners.

They were harvesting sugar beets, corn and soybeans. It was pretty cool to see the sugar beet harvesting, we had a taste of the beets and they were quite tasty. The soybeans were yielding below average, around 2.5t/ha. They had a lot and some very large machinery.

Boomspray - very solid, i think it was 45 metre boom.

Sugar Beet harvester, what a machine, it would chop the green tops of , then pull the beet out of the ground all in one pass

Local ladies going through and cleaning up the left over beets, efficiency of machine somewhat lost....

 

The sugar beet crop in the foreground was being harvested, and in the background they are drilling nitrogen, for the next crop of wheat. It is amazing what they can rip of these soils, with 2 crops a year, there is no rest periods.