Ukrainian farmers make stop in Minneapolis and appeal for help

Inside the Ukrainian Center in northeast Minneapolis, amid the now-familiar blue-and-yellow placards saying "Stand with Ukraine," three farmers from Ukraine shared urgent pleas about how Russia's war is preventing their harvest from getting out to a hungry world.

The farmers, who flew from Europe's breadbasket to the heart of U.S. grain country to appeal for money and equipment ahead of a harvest expected to begin at the end of June, also had another message: Ukrainian farming is inextricably linked to American agriculture.

The world is on precipice of a hunger crisis, as 22 million tons of Ukrainian wheat — last year's harvest — sit in storage bins across the war-rocked Eastern European nation. While their hometowns swell with refugees from where Russia's attacks are worst, a delegation from the Ukrainian Agrarian Council flew halfway around the world this week to enlist support from the biggest names in global agriculture.

"CHS, Cargill, ADM," said Igor Novytskyi, who runs a farm in Cherkasy Oblast in central Ukraine. "They are all here. Eighty percent of our tractors are John Deere. We use Monsanto. We use Pioneer."

The reasons for the logjam are many: Blockage of Black Sea ports by the Russian navy. A narrow gauge of rail in European countries. The need for more trucks after farmers donated theirs to the military.

"We will need more than 500 pickups just in a few months," said Lyubomyr Dykun, another one of the Ukrainian farmers. "The last country where the pickups exist? They are in the U.S. You have a lot."

The farmers who visited the Ukrainian Center on Tuesday know they need more than agricultural aid. When one audience member asked how the naval blockade shuttering a dozen Black Sea ports could be lifted, the farmers chuckled as one said, "Aircraft carrier."

"We are not the military guys," said Novytskyi. "America knows what to do."

Ukraine is a world leader in wheat production, sending tons to Somalia, Egypt, Laos and elsewhere. Roughly 80% of its exports normally flow through the Black Sea. While a U.S.-led military operation to end Putin's chokehold on Black Sea ports seems unlikely, Ukrainian forces armed with U.S. weaponry have mounted a counteroffensive to retake the port city of Kherson.

Luda Anastazievsky, who has lived in Minnesota for 32 years but grew up in the port city of Mariupol, sat in the front row Tuesday and, at one point, leapt up and grabbed a map to illustrate where the country's bountiful crops — from potatoes to sunflower oil and corn to soybeans to wheat — would normally exit on ships.

"Only this much left on the Black Sea," she said, pointing to a single port on the map. "Before," she said, sweeping her finger over the coastline, "look at how many ports it had."

When one audience member asked whether corporate agriculture giants had pushed out family farms, the Ukrainian farmers, speaking sometimes through a translator, calmly added up the hectares of wheat and the tons of dairy they produce annually.

"I moved with my family to a small village, and we started from zero," said Novytskyi, noting that he now employs 300 people. "We became bigger. But it's still a family farm."

Helen Chorolec, who also sat in the audience Tuesday, grew up in Minneapolis as a first-generation Ukrainian American. Her grandfather had worked in Ukraine on a Soviet collective farm.

"He always talked about the soil in Ukraine, that it was black as coal and greasy like butter. When you picked it up, it would stay solid in a chunk," Chorolec said. "He would always talk about that because they always had dreams of going back."

The impromptu delegation plans to return home at week's end. They have planted their crops. Soon, there will be another harvest. Whether there are grain bins that can store the grains — or if the bins will still be full from last year's harvest — remains a question.

As he spoke about the devastation wrought by Russia's latest invasion of Ukraine, Novytskyi caught himself reminiscing about how much progress Ukraine had made since achieving independence amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"The country was so nice," Novytskyi said, then corrected himself. "It is nice."