Dnipropetrovsk oblast has opened an unusual agricultural facility – a training dairy farm with 120 cows. This was established by the local association of service cooperatives in order to propagate cooperatives and teach the peasants who wish to set up dairy cooperatives and mini-farms with 10-15 cows in their villages.
The training farm shows activation in Ukraine of socially responsible business which cares about establishing partnership with private farms and thus hopes to stop the impoverishment of Ukrainian villages and give every rural family an instrument for prosperity, not just survival. Naturally, businessmen also pursue their own interests here: they want to provide themselves with high-quality raw materials. A businessman, who visited the new facility, was in rapture and said to journalists: “The black earth was very impressive!”
The cooperative movement was a subject of discussions at Ukraine’s Ministry for Agricultural Policies and Food. Deputy Minister Oleksandr Sen emphasized that private farms were turning out a considerable part of agricultural produce but the technologies they apply often result in a poor quality. He noted in this connection a great role of the organization Communal Wellbeing which is developing, in partnership with business, a movement of service cooperatives aimed at raising the incomes of rural communes.
This international charitable facility, which is considered a program executor of the US-based nonprofit aid organization Heifer International and renders assistance to more than 12 million households in 125 countries, is headed by Viktor Teres. He says that 24 dairy cooperatives have already been set up in Ukraine. They are equipped with all the necessary raw-material control and cooling machinery worth 24 million hryvnias. This resulted in a higher quality and lower bacterial pollution of milk as well as in a 15-percent additional payment to cooperative members for quality. The US benefactors helped buy 200 heifers worth 1.6 million dollars for Ukrainian farmers. The organization is planning to set up 29 farms of this kind in the nearest future.
Yet Teres points out that “establishing cooperatives is not charity but a way to develop the Ukrainian countryside, where private households account for 80 percent of milk output.” He also tells about a new burgeoning project, Ecofruit, of berry-growing cooperatives. They unite personal subsidiary plots which find it very difficult to find sales markets on their own. These cooperatives are established in several stages by way of gradual consolidation of land shares until there is a 50-ha plot suitable for growing strawberries, Communal Wellbeing is offering them all kinds of help to apply state-of-the-art technologies, such as drip irrigation and planting the seedlings that have been stored at low temperatures. The Lesiatyn Dairy Source (Ternopil oblast) was the first of this kind of rural associations, which not only produces milk but is also engaged in other activities. This farm will soon gain strength and begin to reap profits, a part of which will be used to set up other cooperatives. Meanwhile, Lesiatyn is employing Italian scientists as instructors.
