News

July 24, 2008

Landkom Aims To Be The Biggest Farmer In The Ukrainian Bread Basket

By Charles Wyatt

Mention Landkom and you are talking big farming with a capital B. Can anyone come up with another farm which has its own bio-diesel unit producing sufficient diesel from oil seed rape to supply its fleet of 66 tractors and other vehicles with biodiesel for around 15p per litre compared with 73p British farmers are paying for red diesel? Can anyone suggest a better way of countering the rising price of fertilisers than growing long stalk wheat which, after combining, is sold as bio-brickettes to Polish power stations? Does anyone know of a farm which has its own medi-vac team of ex-British soldiers, capable of sustaining life in the event of a bad accident long enough to get to a hospital which could be four hours away? The answer to the latter is certainly not as even the biggest farms in the UK are small on this scale. Just as an indicator the total area of Devon, England’s third biggest county which runs from the English Channel up to the Bristol Channel, is 671,100 hectares. Landkom’s plan is to have 350,000 hectares under its belt by 2011, so then it will farming an area more than half the size of Devon.

The next question to be asked is who knows much about Ukraine? Very few hands go up. It is a country only slightly smaller than Texas, which sits on the northern coast of the Black Sea with Poland and Romania to its east and Russia to its west. It took a terrible bashing from both the Germans and the Russians in the 2nd World War and even when it obtained independence from Russia in 1991 democracy remained elusive as the legacy of state control and endemic corruption stalled efforts...