That Boom You Hear Is Ukraine’s Agriculture

With the conflict frozen, money is flowing to modernize farms

Close to the war zone, a farming giant emerges.

Photograph: Joseph Sywenkyj for Bloomberg Businessweek
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Ihor Makarevych bumps along the pitted roads to his fields, talking about warfare and his crops. When conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, helicopter-launched heat flares scorched his land. Later, 19 of his employees were conscripted into the army. “There were nine road checkpoints installed by Ukrainian soldiers near our farmlands,” says the 52-year-old, who was an officer in the Soviet Army in the 1980s.

Makarevych is chief executive officer of Agrofirma Podolivska, which manages farmland in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, to the north bordering Russia and to the east, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, partly controlled by separatists. Despite that proximity, when he arrives at his fields, the war seems far away. Semi-automated New Holland and John Deere combines are starting to harvest corn and sunflowers, following choreography developed by Kharkiv-based coders. Farmers check moisture levels on monitors inside their cabs, while deep-yellow grain is cut against a blue sky, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.