You need to love the soil

Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yaroslav oversaw 60 employees and 6000 hectares of land, where they planted 15 different cultures, including sunflower, wheat and other grains. Once they were harvested, the grains were taken for processing, sold to traders, then exported. 

Now, three and half years into the conflict, Yaroslav is trying to pick up the pieces. Like much of Kharkiv region, Husarivka was under Russian occupation for several months in 2022. Six of Yaroslav's employees were kidnapped, never to be seen again. And closeby, on a dairy farm that he also oversees, almost all the cows were shot dead. "With these fields", says Yaroslav, "we can plant again. But that was a different kind of heartbreak."

After the village was liberated, life did not get easier. "The Russians were still there", says Yaroslav, pointing across a field of wheat, "and the Ukrainian army was here. So there was constant fire." Almost 2000 hectares of wheat got caught in the crossfire and burned completely. 

In the spring of 2023, he tried cautiously to get back to work on the field, but he quickly understood that it was contaminated with explosives. "Just walking around, we found Grads, Smerches, Uragans", he says. He called the State Emergency Service, but with villagers slowly returning to their homes, he also understood the magnitude of demining work that needed to be done. "When people are ready to come home, they will come home", he says. "You can’t tell them 'it's dangerous'. They won't listen. So I understood that the first priority for clearance is the main roads and where people live."

The HALO Trust has been working in Kharkiv region since it was liberated. They have conducted surveys on the land that Yaroslav oversees, set up polygons for clearance, and are now in the process of demining some of those polygons. "I see the resources HALO uses", says Yaroslav, "like drones to survey the land. I know they can do a much more thorough job this way."

As HALO works to clear the land, Yaroslav and his company are slowly picking operations back up again, though on a much smaller scale. They are currently growing five cultures on roughly 2500 of their 6000 hectares. "The volume is not the same, and with such small numbers, it doesn’t make sense to process it for export", says Yaroslav. So they are selling what they can to the local market, but at much lower prices. 

"We used to be large farmers", says Yaroslav, "but now, I don't know what to consider us. The land is still here, but our ability to work with it has disappeared."

Yaroslav can't picture himself doing anything but working with the soil. Asked if he has any hobbies, Yaroslav replies: "Sure, I grow grapes! If my grandpa Yaakov were alive, I can't imagine how much it would hurt him, seeing all this. He used to say to me, 'You need to love the soil. You really need to love it.'"