Dutch farmer Kees Huizinga in Ukraine. His men work in two shifts and harvest from early morning to late evening. “In the coming weeks it will be all or nothing for the world food supply”, Huizinga says

25 comments

  1. [source](https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/nederlandse-boer-in-oekraine-als-je-die-combines-ziet-rijden-vergeet-je-de-oorlog-een-beetje~b2ad3cb2f/)

    ^Translation:

    The first ship full of agricultural products has now set sail from Odessa: on to the world food market. For the Dutch farmer in Ukraine Kees Huizinga, the worries have not gone away. If the Russians fire one missile at Odessa everything will grind to a halt.

    The dust swirls high, the engines roar. Row after row, Kees Huizinga’s combines skim the wheat branches. The yield disappears through a trunk into a trailer behind the tractor. Storks look on from the sidelines – eager for mice, not for a piece of the pie. “This is the best time to be here,” beams the Dutch farmer. His men work in two shifts on the harvest, from early morning to late evening. “Seeing those combines driving around here like this makes you forget about the war a little.”

    On Monday, a first ship carrying agricultural products left the port of Odessa. Its contents, 26,000 tons of corn, were left over from last season’s harvest. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supplies have been piling up: Ukraine has placed mines in the sea, and Russian warships patrol along shipping lanes. “It’s a first step, but I don’t trust the Russians one bit,” Huizinga says of the grain agreement that Russia and Ukraine signed on July 22, with intervention from Turkey and the UN, to revive exports.

    In two decades, the Dutchman transformed a number of former collective Soviet farms near Oeman into a thriving mega-farm. On his 15,000 acres of land, he grows vegetables, corn, sunflowers, rapeseed – and grain, the 4,000 acres of which will be harvested this week. “When all of a sudden there were missiles flying around, I didn’t know what to expect,” says the farmer. In early spring, numerous refugees spent the night on his property; Huizinga also supports the military, shipping used pickup trucks to Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying a lot, but not making much progress anymore,” he now knows.

    Fuel shortage remains problem
    Huizinga was lucky, he tells himself. When the invasion began, his storage was already mostly empty; prices were favorable enough to sell, he had thought. His neighbor waited, and therefore has a big problem: a full store, including last season’s wheat.

    For himself, the fuel shortage remains a headache: while Huizinga’s company consumes 1.5 to 2 million liters of diesel annually, oil was in limited supply until last month – a result of Russia’s bombing of oil storage facilities and lack of imports through its ports. Although Ukraine is now importing fuel from Europe on a large scale, the concern remains. “This is just the beginning of the harvest,” says Huizinga. “The grain may be almost gone, but look: the corn has yet to mature,” he points to the waxing plumes along the road.

    In recent months, Kees Huizinga has toured The Hague and Brussels to sound the alarm about the lack of exports. “My concern was first and foremost about our company, but with that about all Ukrainian farmers, and the effect on grain supplies around the world.” His gaze wanders back to his combines, which mow a dozen soccer fields smoothly in no time: “This is what makes Ukraine so efficient,” he says. “Ukraine is such a big player. If exports go away because the port is blocked, it’s just over.” Ukraine consumes a quarter of its own production, the farmer explains. Three-quarters is export. And that, as before Huizinga’s products, goes through the port of Odessa.

    The departure of the first ship, last Monday, does not make the Dutch farmer optimistic. “I don’t believe the Russians. Because they are shooting down Ukraine, and well, they say something different every day.” Huizinga himself therefore developed an alternative for next year. If fifty trucks all make one trip a week, he calculates that in fifty weeks he will export his entire production to Romania. Still, there is no alternative to the port, he stresses. “We are a big company, speak English and have contacts. The neighbor doesn’t have that.” According to his estimates, Ukraine exports a maximum of 30 percent of its revenue by train and truck, Huizinga thinks, no more.

    So in the coming weeks it will be “all or nothing” for the world’s food supply, Huizinga thinks. “If the Russians fire one missile at Odessa everything comes to a halt again. No insurer is going to pay anymore, no ship owner is going to send his ship here.” Only pressure on Russia will work; and it may be that the Russians, too, realize that they have an interest in normalizing food shipments. “If all the people in Africa soon have nothing to eat, everyone will know that Russia is the culprit.”

    Despite everything, the Dutchman is already preparing for the new sowing season. An empty field cannot exist for Kees Huizinga. “We continue to grow our crops. If we were to stop doing that, everything would be over.”

  6. Hoe kan het toch dat er zo veel graan uit enkel Oekraïne komt? De wereld is zo groot, waarom lijkt dit een single point of failure? Bizar dat een wereld bevolking afhankelijk kan zijn van 1 land.

  8. So cool! I recently (finally) decided to stop eating meat because of the threatening food crisis. Glad to see that there are people trying to save as much wheat as possible.

  11. Voor dit soort mensen hang ik m’n vlag wel uit. Wel gewoon bovensteboven natuurlijk.

  13. Serieus, “all or nothing for the world food supply” ..? Die paar procent van Oekraïne? Altijd lachen met agrariërs 😅

  14. Some of our farmers are whining little subsidy-dependant snowflake traitors. Some are like this guy. Be like this guy. What a hero.

  19. These workers have balls of steel! To harvest in an active warzone, just fucking WOW. I’ll raise a glass to yinz!

  20. Dankjewel kees dat je niet die idioten bende hoort die nu gaande is in nederland en daadwerkelijk doet wat een boer doet inplaats van handje ophouden en gaan lopen zeiken als papa de regels aanscherpt

  25. Ukraine exported $27,8B worth of agricultural products in 2021. The EU exported €196,9B worth of agricultural goods in 2021 and the USA exported $150,1B in 2020. Neither the EU nor the USA are nations focused on agricultural production so this is leaving aside nations like Australia, Argentina or Brazil. On top of that the fast majority of food production in the world is meant for consumption within the nation. “All or nothing for the world food supply” is a bit of an overstatement don’t you think?

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