Rivne Region
To support the Ukrainian agricultural sector during the war, the USAID AGRO Activity, under the USAID Initiative to support agricultural sector resilience — AGRI-Ukraine, provided specialized equipment for drying and storing grain.
Yuri Mykolayovych Potapchuk is the head of the “SnovMilk” farm, founded in Rivne Region in September 2014. The farm is engaged in raising dairy cattle.
Currently, the farm has up to 100 cows. About 30 types of craft cheeses are made from the milk using unique Italian technologies, and they are continuously learning and expanding their product range.
Yuri Mykolayovych shared how they started the enterprise: “We had the idea to create a farm to eventually process and sell our own natural dairy products. Initially, it was a hobby, but after attending cheese-making courses, we decided to work in this field professionally. We trained in Italy, Poland, and Germany. This is how we started our cheese-making business.”
Cows need feed, but with the start of the full-scale invasion, due to constant shelling of infrastructure, complicated logistics, and overloaded grain storage and drying facilities, like other Ukrainian farmers, Yuri’s farm faced the challenge of preserving the grown products for further processing into feed.
To support the Ukrainian agricultural sector during the war, the USAID AGRO Activity, under the USAID Initiative to support agricultural sector resilience – AGRI-Ukraine, provided specialized equipment for drying and storing grain. In the Rivne region, such equipment was received by Polissya-Garant LLC.
“Thanks to the USAID AGRO Activity, we are collaborating with Polissya-Garant LLC to dry and store the grain we grow for animal feed. Access to such a service in our region has always been a problem for small farmers or small farms like ours. Elevator capacities were only available to large agricultural enterprises that processed only their own grain and did not provide such services to others. Therefore, the initiative was a necessary opportunity for us to ensure timely harvesting, high-quality processing at a modern elevator. We knew the company because we annually purchase high-quality corn grain from them for animal feed, as we do not always have enough of our own. We are located nearby and have close communication, and thanks to the grant received, we were also given a discount on processing and storage services. These were the most affordable prices in the region, which was also a wonderful surprise,” says Yuri.
The farmer says that since the start of the full-scale war, it has become harder to work, particularly because of the decreased purchasing power of the population. “But we keep working because we have milk, and it needs to be processed. We sell cheese in branded stores located in Goshcha and Rivne. We also have individual orders. We make cheese in small quantities, only from the milk of our own healthy verified farm cows, which consume quality ecological feed and graze in pastures rich in diverse grasses in summer. It is 100% cow’s milk cheese, without any additives,” says the head of “SnovMilk”. Even during the war, the farmer plans to continue developing livestock farming, increasing milk processing volumes, and expanding his own branded store network.
With the support of the USAID AGRO Activity, under the AGRI Initiative, enterprises with elevator capacities will increase the simultaneous grain storage capacity by 193 thousand tons and drying capacity by 375 thousand tons. The projects will provide corresponding services to almost 1,000 micro, small, and medium agricultural producers from 10 regions of Ukraine.
