The Prairie Star, MT
10-10-07
Western influence comes to Ukrainian beef producers
By Wendy Sweeter, Editor
SDSU Extension specialists Cody Wright and Eric Mousel viewed villages like
this one on their trip to Ukraine. Photo courtesy of Cody Wright
A pair of South Dakota State University Extension specialists made their way to
Ukraine this summer to give advice on cow/calf production.
SDSU Extension beef specialist Cody Wright and Extension range livestock
production specialist Eric Mousel traveled to Ukraine for seven days this summer
with two other Americans - Kurt Walters, a veterinarian from Buffalo, Wyo., and
Chip Ramsey, manager of Rex Ranch in Ashby, Neb.
The four men made their way overseas to consult a diversified ag company on a
pilot cow/calf operation project. The company, Druzhba Narodiv, is the livestock
breeding and crop growing enterprise of a larger company, Myronivsky
Hliboproduct. The company currently has a packing plant, feedlot, dairy,
seedstock operation and poultry.
Wright explains they got involved through Darrell Busby, Iowa State University
Extension beef field specialist. Officials from Druzhba Narodiv had worked with
Busby on some feedlot projects in the past but needed some advice on running a
cow/calf operation. That is where Wright, Mousel, Walters and Ramsey come in.
About a year and a half ago, company officials came to the United States.
“One of the things they were interested in was seeing how we managed the
winter because for years and years and years, the Soviets had always told them
that the cattle had to be housed indoors over the winter, locked where they didn't
go outside or anything,” Wright said.
Mousel believes one of the obstacles the company faces is accepting that cattle
can live outside year-round.
“They just have not been able to grasp the concept that livestock can live outside
in the winter and things like that,” Mousel said. “I think once they have a few
successful years of producing some calves and getting them to market, I think
they'll really buy into a system that they just don't fully understand yet.”
The focus of the trip was to recommend to Druzhba Narodiv how many cow/calf
pairs they could run on how much pasture, evaluate pastures and forages and
basically take them from start to finish on a cow/calf operation.
Wright says they were essentially starting from scratch.
“This branch of the company didn't own a cow,” Wright said. “The plan was that
this new operation was going to go out and buy some of the ‘native' cows. I
would equate them to a milking Simmental. They weren't very beefy looking but
they weren't necessarily a milk cow either.”
The group of Americans toured pastures the company had lined up to rent. Each
pasture was between 5,000 and 10,000 acres and were surrounded by miles of
pine forest in the northwest part of the country.
Mousel's main focus on the trip was to evaluate the pastures. He said most of the
grasses were smooth brome, orchard grass and intermediate wheat grass.
Pasture quality varied from place to place because some pastures had not been
grazed for five to 10 years while others had been used pretty hard for the last
couple of years.
“A lot of it just depended on who was in control of it. Some of it, at least as near
as I could tell, was owned by the government but controlled by the local
government,” Mousel said.
He found it interesting that under the old Soviet Union, the government owned all
of the land and for the most part they were still using that system where the
government owned the land and the villages used it as a commons.
“Nobody really owns it but everybody uses it,” Mousel said. “That was very
prevalent over there, which is not a good management strategy.”
Mousel felt they could graze the pastures year-round because they only got
about a foot of snow for the whole winter. However, they did not have any
historical weather data to go off of because the Soviet military was not really
willing to give out that information and they did not know how accurate it would
be anyway.
“We really had to go on what the locals told us, which was that they get moderate
amounts of snow. It can get very cold for certain periods, but for the most part,
hovers around freezing,” Mousel said. “We suspect that would be very conducive
to winter grazing, provided that they didn't get a tremendous amount of snow.”
Mousel and Wright's recommendation was to rotational graze by using temporary
solar-powered electric fence. They said the company was not interested in
building fences since labor was cheap and building materials were not.
“These guys were good businessmen. They didn't want to invest in anything they
didn't have to and labor was incredibly cheap,” Wright said. “It was kind of a
different system than we're used to here where we can get a fence put in and not
need a lot of labor. These guys were just the opposite.
“They would prefer not to put fences in and not to put corrals in and they'd hire
three or four guys to sit with the cattle all day. It was very, very cheap,” he said.
Wright says most of the big farming occurs in the eastern part of Ukraine. Where
they were, farms varied from manual labor on an acre of ground to John Deere
tractors using 40-foot wheat drills.
He says the people who have embraced capitalism have done pretty well.
“That's what this company has done. They think about things from a business
perspective. They're in it to make money,” Wright said. “At the same time, they
did want to take care of the villages, so if they could hire people to come out and
help with the cattle operation, they wanted to try to do that just to try to put more
money into the communities.”
Transportation is going to be a big problem to overcome in that part of Ukraine.
“It's not so much that it's real primitive; it's just that their road system is not real
kept up. Most of the individuals that live in that part of the country don't own an
automobile so they don't care what the roads are like,” Mousel said. “I don't know
how big a barrier that's going to be, but at least initially that does seem to be
something that really needs to be considered.”
Mousel says they are unaware of any one else doing anything similar to this
project in Ukraine. Beef is not a primary food in Europe or Ukraine, but they
would like more of it.
He says that was the basis for this whole project. The company wanted to find a
way to get away from the old Soviet mindset of everyone owns a few animals to
one where people can buy beef at a grocery store.
“It's definitely been a challenge for them,” Mousel said. “It's going to take some
time and I think they were very smart to bring some folks over there from the
West to help them get started to avoid any type of miscalculation that could really
compromise the whole project,” he said.
As of now, Wright and Mousel have not heard from the company on what their
plans are for moving forward.
Mousel says Druzhba Narodiv has a long way to go before the cow/calf operation
is a reality, but he thinks they definitely have the desire and resources to do it.
“It's just a matter of getting them started down the right track so they don't end up
in a big blowup that would compromise the whole project,” Mousel said.