The director of the association of farming enterprises “Olvia”, Petro Bezverkhniy, shows us the hangar where they once stored grain that was harvested with Soviet Niva combines. This is where the enterprise’s story began, having grown alongside independent Ukraine. Today only damaged walls remain of the old building. The roof was destroyed by Russian shelling.
Petro Bezverkhniy talks more willingly about the future than about the past. About the harvest that is already sprouting in the fields. About restored machinery. About the watermelons, the harvest of which failed last year for the first time in three decades due to a prolonged drought, but this year’s forecasts are optimistic. And about the pond where crucian carp and carp have reappeared.
“Our slogan was: what didn’t burn will be restored,” — says Petro.
From brooms to modern agribusiness
Olvia’s story began in the late 1980s in the village of Knyazivka in the Vysokopil region.
Petro Bezverkhniy’s father came here from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 1988. At that time the collective farm system was already beginning to collapse, and land was gradually being leased.
The first business was far from modern agricultural production.
“My father grew melons, brooms were tied. At that time, due to total lack of money, there was a barter system. At the Kharkiv Tractor Plant they traded brooms and watermelons for new T-150 tractors,” — the farmer recalls.
Over time the farm expanded. Hundreds of hectares of land appeared, grain crops, sunflower, peas. Petro Bezverkhniy became a second-generation farmer.
Today the core of production is sunflower, rapeseed and winter wheat. They also grow peas, flax and melons. Animal husbandry and poultry farming, which had been actively developed at “Olvia” until 2022, suffered greatly because of the war and occupation. Currently the enterprise has a small number of pigs and sheep.
And there is a desire to restore that component of activity, but there are no opportunities yet.
Shrimp in the middle of the steppe
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, “Olvia” was one of the most diversified farms in the Kherson region.
It had a pigsty with breeding stock, a sheepfold, and fish ponds. Before the war farmers even began an experiment growing shrimp in the Kherson steppe.
In 2021 they arranged two separate ponds for this, which they planned to fill with water from artesian wells. Petro Bezverkhniy says the ponds were almost ready: they had completed almost all construction work and planned to launch production in 2022. But the war interfered.
An important part of the farm is an apiary of 300 bee colonies. Bees are necessary for pollinating rapeseed crops to ensure good yields.
Petro Bezverkhniy himself combines the work of a farmer and a scientist. He completed postgraduate studies and defended a dissertation dedicated to improving the John Deere seeding complex for No-Till technology — a modern farming method that completely eliminates plowing and deep tillage. Seeds are sown with special planters directly into untilled soil covered with a layer of chopped plant residues — stubble and mulch.
“Who would have thought before the war that these developments would have to be applied in conditions of drought and post-war recovery,” — he says.
Self-defense instead of territorial defense
At the beginning of March 2022, farmers of the Vysokopil area were still trying to organize the defense of their villages.
On the basis of the farm’s security service they effectively created a civilian district unit led by a former law enforcement officer. Local farmers, hunters and volunteers set up checkpoints and monitored residents’ compliance with the curfew.
“It wasn’t territorial defense but self-defense. We held out for three more weeks. But when the Russians began to enter, they were already using artillery and “Grads”. With hunting rifles against that there was no chance”, — Bezverkhniy recalls.
Then the farmers prepared buses to evacuate people.
“We fueled them enough to get to Uzhhorod. But many people refused to leave. The buses remained with the occupiers along with the fuel”, — says Petro.
After the occupation, the farm found itself practically on the front line.
Russian forces used the building of the Vysokopil hospital as an observation post from which they adjusted artillery strikes.
“They could see our enterprise as if on the palm of their hand. They struck here constantly”, — says the director.
The most terrible was the fire in the pigsty.
After a mine hit, the wooden roof insulated with reeds caught fire. Workers tried to extinguish the flames with water from barrels, but there was no chance.
About 300 breeding pigs died in the fire.
No less a tragedy was the shelling of the sheepfold. As a result of a direct hit by a Russian shell, 200 of 300 sheep were killed.
During the occupation only two workers remained on the farm — the married couple Tetiana and Ivan. They have lived and worked here for more than twenty years.
“They, — Petro Bezverkhniy recounts, — are natives of Moldova. They came to us without their own housing. They settled at the farm; their children were born and finished school here”.
It was they who took care of the animals and saved property under fire.
The tractor-hero and the “time capsule”
One of the tractors became a separate legend of the farm.
When roads were destroyed and people fled the war and occupation via field roads, the tractor carried them in trailers toward Kryvyi Rih.
According to Petro Bezverkhniy, almost three thousand people were evacuated this way.
After de-occupation, the same machine helped clear mines from fields. With its help, about 5 thousand hectares of land were cleared of mines and other ordnance.
Eventually the tractor blew up on an anti-tank mine.
“The operators didn’t even get a scratch. The machine’s construction is such that a person inside is fairly protected”, — says the farmer.
We approach the remains of the Soviet UAZ-469 vehicle, popularly known as «bobik».
“It was, — says Petro Bezverkhniy, — standing with us as a museum exhibit. It was absolutely new, a kind of “time capsule”. Unfortunately the Russians destroyed it.”
After the liberation of the Vysokopil community, Petro Bezverkhniy and his family returned home.
Fields had to be demined. Seed for sowing was grown in Dnipropetrovsk region, where they worked during the occupation.
The most difficult task was saving the equipment.
New combines, seeders and a self-propelled John Deere sprayer, purchased only two weeks before the start of the full-scale war, were damaged by shrapnel and explosions.
“We had to invest 80% of its value into the new combine. It took a month just to evacuate the equipment. Then restoration took two years”, — the director says.
External carriers refused to go into the danger zone, so the farm bought its own low-loader and independently transported the broken equipment for repair to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
Once after the liberation of the Vysokopil area, when the Russians had not yet been driven out of the right-bank part of Kherson region, chance saved Petro Bezverkhniy and other workers who were engaged in evacuating equipment.
“Once, — Petro recounts, — we were forced to delay and arrived for the equipment two hours later than planned. And thanks to that we did not get caught in a heavy shelling: the Russians were firing artillery at our territory”.
Today the fleet of agricultural machinery has been restored to about 90%.
Petro Bezverkhniy does not hide that to restore the equipment he had to take large loans, the repayment of which now “eats up” a significant part of the enterprise’s income.
Water is being restored thanks to the sun
Artesian wells used by the enterprise silted up during the occupation, and the blowing up of the Kakhovka HPP by Russian troops changed the region’s climatic conditions.
“A huge evaporation surface disappeared. We can already see that precipitation is decreasing. After the HPP was blown up, sunflower still gave a record harvest because moisture had remained stored in the soil. Now the situation is different”, — explains the farmer.
To bring life back to the ponds, the farm installed solar panels to power pumps, because using electricity from the public grid for this is very expensive.
“We had two ponds, — Petro Bezverkhniy explains, — one for poultry, in the other we raised fish. There were carp. We even planned to farm paddlefish (freshwater fish of the order Acipenseriformes that are raised by fish farms for valuable meat and black caviar, — MOST). And these ponds fed a third pond — for public use, which people called the ‘kolkhoz’ pond; they went there to fish and relax”.
Water is gradually returning. Along with it the fish are returning: crucian carp and young carp have been introduced into one of the ponds.
The pigsty has not yet been restored. There is a lack of funds for that.
On the other hand, sheep breeding was preserved. Surviving sheep gave offspring, and the flock is increasing again.
The four-legged “shepherds” who survived the occupation and hostilities are the Alabai dogs Milka and Rey.
Rapeseed, sunflower and wheat are growing in the fields. This year the farm expects a watermelon harvest. And they hope that nature will be sufficiently favorable to Kherson’s farmers and help them restore production as quickly as possible.