Dairy farm in Ukraine’s Donbas region struggles to survive

DMYTRIVKA, Ukraine — One of the last working dairy farms on Ukrainian-controlled territory in the eastern Donbas region is doing everything it can to stay afloat in a place where neither workers nor animals are safe from Russia’s devastating war.

Only around 200 head of cattle remain of the nearly 1,300 kept at the farm before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The 8,000-acre (3,200-hectare) farm, set amid rolling hills in embattled Donetsk province, is producing two tons of milk a day compared to 11 tons daily before the war, its managers say.

While a significant proportion of the KramAgroSvit farm’s revenues also once came from cultivating wheat, continuing that work comes with risks. As a farm employee harvested wheat with a grain combine on Sunday, the machine hit two land mines, resulting in a fire that burned more than 60% of the worker’s body.

The worker survived, but is in critical condition as doctors tend to an infection.

An inspection by an emergency services team found 19 additional mines in the field, said Ihor Kriuchenko, the farm’s senior livestock technician, adding that going out to harvest now is “very dangerous due to the shelling and mines.” Farmhands drive combines around visible artillery fragments to avoid them.

Such realities of war have created a cascading series of complications that coalesced to drive the farm’s business down dramatically. In the nearby city of Kramatorsk, the provisional capital of Donetsk province, Russia’s attacks and a lack of gas for heating and cooking have caused most residents to evacuate, creating less demand for dairy products and, consequently, falling profits.

Business also took a hit as Russian forces captured several other cities where the farm had distributed its milk and those markets disappeared behind the front line.

Such conditions — disrupted demand and supply chains along with danger from shelling and mines — have made the prospect of farming in eastern Ukraine fraught with risks that threaten the future of the KramAgroSvit farm, which has been in business since 2003.

“This farm was hit (by a rocket), and 38 cows were killed, plus some of our farming equipment and vehicles were destroyed. Investors decided it was too risky to keep so many cows here, so they were sold abroad,” Kriuchenko said.

The farm’s owner had all the pigs and rabbits once raised there slaughtered and sold amid the uncertainty, he said.

Anna Lavrenyuk, general…