Reading Time: 4 minutes I can imagine how Canadians feel when they watch news from Ukraine. Not long ago, we in Ukraine watched reports from Iraq and Syria, and it seemed to us like a broadcast from another planet — a planet of cruelty and destruction. Now we live on this planet. To maintain a healthy mind, we have […] Read more

Report from Ukraine: Watermelons and raccoons — there’s still laughter amidst the tears
The people of Ukraine are coping with adversity any way they can as winter’s grip deepens

Farmers displaced by war wait to reclaim their fields
On the edge of the front lines, one producer waits, hoping to recover the farm just a mile away
Reading Time: 5 minutes From time to time, Oleh visits the positions of troops on the front lines of war in east Ukraine. While there, he looks hopefully to the horizon. There, just one mile away, are his fields, shop and grain warehouse now occupied by Russian invaders. I will not write Oleh’s last name, nor will I show […] Read more

A new rural economy emerges in Ukraine
There have been creative responses to depressed grain prices but no field will go unharvested
Reading Time: 4 minutes Glacier FarmMedia – When we first heard the sounds of rocket explosions on Feb. 24, we were most alarmed. It took my entire credit card limit to fill up my car and buy a supply of groceries. At the time, I thought only a few hours remained until the end of normal life. Many Ukrainian […] Read more

Farming behind the lines: Growers in Ukraine plant amid hostilities close by
'We started the sowing campaign by removing rockets from the field'
Viktor and Sergiy Shipov are used to adversity. Viktor established a farming company in southern Ukraine 20 years ago, in the Mykolaiv Oblast, where hellish heat and lack of rainfall can make the land look like the Sahara Desert with yellow dunes. This is a corner of the classic Ukrainian steppe, where rainfall is very […] Read more

Farming behind the lines: Ukraine’s farmers sow amidst wreckage
Despite their best efforts, however, famine looms as war rages
In early April, Ukrainian soldiers expelled the Russian invaders from the northern regions of Ukraine: Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions. The wounded enemy left, leaving behind burned-out war machines and the unburied corpses of his soldiers. However, the invaders managed to do a lot of damage. Many of you are probably aware of the atrocities […] Read more

Farming behind the lines: Hostages of globalization
Imagine — even if it looks unrealistic — that one day Canada will be cut off from the rest of the world. And all import deliveries to the country will be possible, for example, only through Alaska, only by trains along one route. It sounds absurd, but Ukraine, in the very heart of Europe, is […] Read more

Farming behind the lines in Ukraine
A Ukrainian agriculture journalist chronicles the challenges of sowing a crop during wartime
Ukrainians will farm their land, even in the face of war. In the Kherson area of southern Ukraine, where war rages and the city of Kherson is seen by the Russian invaders as strategic, a column set out on Monday. This was a column of tractors, under the flag of Ukraine. In it were farmers […] Read more

Bread and war: Farmers in the fight for Ukraine
Agriculture, being the most important industry in Ukraine, will play a large part in the war, a Ukrainian ag journalist writes
It is very difficult to explain what a person feels when they’re awakened at 5 a.m., when a rocket explodes near their house. That’s exactly what I experienced Feb. 24. The first thing I did was fill my car with gasoline. Then we bought a lot of products we thought we might need — medicines […] Read more