"Are Ukrainian Farmers an Endangered Species?"

Probably.

There are a few things going on that point in that direction. First you have the country's total fertility rate at 1.4, only two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement rate, tied with poster child Japan in the who's-going-extinct competition. And lower even than famously-low-birthrate-Russia, which at 1.8 has a comparative population boom. So there will literally not be enough people to take up the job.

Second, compounding the lack of births is the Ukrainian diaspora, starting with the Bandera crowd heading for Canada after WWII and which really got rolling after the collapse of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in '91, picked up even more steam after the U.S. backed coup and Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and added another five or six million souls after the Russian invasion in February. 

Poland alone has taken in over three million and with a GDP per capita of triple (PPP) or quadruple (nominal) Ukraine's, is now wondering how to encourage the refugees to go home when the hostilities stop. As the old song says: "How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Wroclaw?" 

Or something like that.

Third, a lot of people have coveted that thick black soil and not just Imperial Germany and then the Nazis with the whole lebensraum thing. One of the reasons for the 2014 coup was to get hold of that dirt, which is priced at a fifth to a quarter of the equivalent in Illinois. In furtherance of  the project the IMF made opening up land sales to foreigners a condition of one of their multi-billion dollar loan packages.

 

And then there's this, from DTN Progressive Farmer, July 22:

During a week when December corn and November soybean prices have been the victims of more noncommercial selling and a timely forecast for rain in the week ahead, DTN Canadian Grains Analyst Cliff Jamieson shared a webinar link that had been produced by the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS). The topic was, "What Will Happen to Ukrainian Grains?" (View the entire webinar).

I'll admit up front I was afraid this would be another sterile presentation of analysts, saying things like, "We expect Ukraine to export 9 million metric tons (mmt) of corn in 2022-23," and totally disregard the horrific reality of what life must be like to farm in a war, not knowing if your tractor is about to hit a mine or you are about to take a bullet from some Russian soldier, looking for target practice.

As it turned out, the webinar was well done and I want to share some of the comments from Mykola Gorbachov, the president of the Ukrainian Grain Association, as he described the situation in Ukraine. Gorbachov's 2022-23 export estimates of 10 mmt of corn, 10 mmt of wheat and 2 mmt of barley were close to USDA estimates of 9 mmt, 10 mmt and 1.8 mmt, respectively. It's the conditions surrounding those export estimates that got my attention.

Gorbachov pointed out part of the current difficulties of exporting grain through western neighbors are the restricted capacities encountered crossing borders. Using all the avenues available in western Ukraine, 2.2 mmt of grain were exported in June, far less than the country's export potential of 70 mmt a year before the war. Even worse, Ukrainian farmers, used to paying $35 to $40 per metric ton (mt) to transport grain to Black Sea ports, are now having to pay $160 to $180 per mt to move grain out of the country, making the cost of growing and exporting grains like wheat and barley highly unprofitable.

For that reason, Gorbachov explained he expects planting to be sharply curtailed in 2023. Wheat and barley are likely to be abandoned, he said, with farmers opting instead for the more profitable choices of sunflower seeds and rapeseed. Having lost access to credit and crop protection programs, he expects half of Ukrainian farmers will become bankrupt in the next few months....

....MUCH MORE