This is a subscriber-only article
Last week I had the opportunity to visit one of the countries that made up the old Soviet Union – Kazakhstan. The progress here in crop production has been remarkable, as it has been in much of the old USSR.
It is this progress that has transformed the region into the world’s major cereal exporter and providing major competition for European cereal producers. In Soviet times, the region could not feed itself. The privatisation of farming has had truly remarkable effects.
A country the size of western Europe but with just 18 million people, it is undergoing an extraordinary farming transformation. Some of the changes have parallels with Ireland’s land history, some of it is radically different. Kazakhstan was traditionally a cattle-dominated farming economy with nomadic farmers moving their cattle around the vast central Asian grass plains of the Steppes.
Stalin, the Russian dictator, moved the cattle farmers off and forced through a massive collectivisation programme. Huge farms were established with a full range of buildings, stock and machinery.
The programme was interrupted by the second world war but got going with renewed vigour in the 1950s. The structure survived intact until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when Kazakhstan became an independent state, but the new state retains ownership of the land.
Similarities with the Irish Land Acts
All the farmers we spoke to had leases from the state for 49 years. It seems that while the land is leased from the state, hardly any money changes hands and that in effect the last 20 years has seen the emergence of a corps of highly capable individual farmers who have expanded by taking over the leases of their less dynamic neighbours.
Some of the farms are breathtakingly large – 30,000 ha or 75,000 acres is not uncommon. It is expected that over the next year or so these leaseholders will be given the opportunity to buy their land over a period of years on an annuity basis.
The similarities with the approach taken under the Irish Land Acts is striking. But the scale is utterly different.
Since independence, the farmers have been free to sell their production – mainly extremely high-quality pasta and bread wheat – anywhere in the world. The old obligation to supply Russia and the Soviet Union no longer applies.
Nor does the obligation to buy Russian machinery continue. We visited farms that had up to 20 new Claas combines and sowing equipment to match and who were selling their wheat to countries such as Italy, Iran, across north Africa etc.
Nationally, Kazakhstan has replicated what has happened in the Black Sea region – it has become a massive surplus producer of top-quality wheat. Of almost 10m tonnes produced, almost 7m is exported.
Cold
But farming in Kazakhstan is no joke. Winters are bitterly cold and temperatures routinely go down to below -30°C while the summers in the most continental climate on earth can go as high as 40°C.
Wheat is sown in late May or very early June and harvested in late August. While the quality is very high, with protein at 14.5% to 16%, the yield is very low at about 1t/ha or 400kg per acre. Little or no fertiliser is applied, and no fungicides.
Cost control, scale and selling price are all critical. The current volatility and low cereal prices is in my view testing the people and the system to their limits, but they still intend to try and buy their farms.
SHARING OPTIONS: