AgriScience Journal of Sustainable Agriculture and Agroecology
A Path to the Future-Ukraine's Wheatland and the War
Abstract
Lloyd C. Irland
Ukrainian Hutterites brought the first winter wheat strains to Central Kansas after 1873. The Tsar had eliminated the draft exemption that inspired their emigration to the New World. Their winter wheat – which was a winter instead of a summer crop -- was a while to catch on. But it became the core of the standard approach – winter dry fallow -- to growing wheat in the Northern Plains today. By 1919, in a USDA survey, crops based on material grown from Ukrainian stock accounted for 83% of the area sown. It was the most popular until 1944. It appears that the cost of the invasion to the economy will be $349 billion dollars which exceeds the pre -invasion GDP of Ukraine. Not surprisingly the invasion created losses that represent substantial capital investment over many years. The losses to Ukrainian agriculture through July 2023 stood at $8.7 billion in direct losses to agriculture and $40.3 billion in total. For comparison US farm income was about $110 billion in 2024. Other measures of the impact on Ukraine can be found in Plokhy, 2023 [1].
Wheat used to be heart of what we understand as Ukraine’s very special niche. But it’s real market share is oil seeds. Besides that, it has also gained importance as a corn growing area in the country’s center. But let’s keep this simple and focus only on wheat, which is the item most grown in the East.
I would like to review a number different aspects of the overall impact of the changes in agriculture due to the war. Then I will focus on Donetsk, a good example for two reasons. First it is very large area of farmland. The second is that it is a divided province with a zone which has been seized by Russia. These are serious because Ukrainian agriculture supports 14% of the workers, compared to about 2% in the US.
