International
agri-businesses, as in large scale, progressive and not small scale, cash strapped, local farmers, are announcing some heady winter
wheat yields.
Trigon
Agri managed 5.61mt/ha in Kharkov and an impressive 5.99mt/ha in Kirovograd.
Kernel
Holding is reporting 5.60mt/ha from 30kha of winter wheat.
All of
this is great news and a combination of good management and favourable weather
is rightly being cited as the reason for improved crop productivity.
But in
the Ukraine agri-business environment this news could have repercussions that
are less than good.
If you
look at farming around the world, simply put they are either low input output
large scale systems as found in Australia and Canada or high input output small
scale systems such as those in parts of Europe.
What is
being tried in Ukraine is high input output over large areas and is without precedent.
Early on
in Ukraine’s agricultural renaissance it became apparent that simply lifting
high yielding agri systems from Europe and the USA and dropping them into Ukraine
didn't work.
The fundamentals
of farming remained but Ukraine has its own unique set of issues that eroded anticipated high crop yields.
Add to
that the issue that businesses were trying to implement a farming system that
had not been tried with problems we hadn't anticipated and you can understand why the financial
results and physical performance were all over the place.
The point
I’m leading up to is that Ukraine agri-business are still immature, have over stretched
and over promised and are often run by none farming management with short term
views who react to markets.
So if
wheat yields well this year it will be gung-ho into wheat this autumn followed
by a scratching of heads when for a multitude of reasons it doesn't do as well
as we had expected.
It is no
joke when I recount stories of investors or accountants who seriously argued to
grow 100% oilseed rape or 100% seed potatoes because these were the most
profitable crop that year.
While you
don’t strictly need farmers to manage these large agri-businesses it does help to have
that long term view and grudging acceptance on board that not every crop in
every year is going stick rigidly to the plan.
We have rotations to spread risk, they teach you that in week one at agricultural college.