The dairy farm of LLC Kolos (Borodyanka, Kyiv region) was under occupation for more than a month. Only 10 employees remained on the farm. They lived right in the cowbarn and took care of the cattle. About the heroic maintenance of the farm and the current situation in the dairy sector of Ukraine - in the video of Suspilny TV-channel.
Employees of LLC Kolos say that on February 27, the occupiers drove through the farm in a convoy, and set up a roadblock near the farm.
Ten farm workers did not leave the cows. At first they hid in basements, later they moved into a cowbarn. In field conditions, they learned to bake bread. They wore white bandages on their hands.
During the occupation, the company was cut off. Cows were milked thanks to a diesel generator, fodder was transported by tractors. Employees tied a white medical coat to the equipment and thus had the opportunity to go to the warehouse for fuel through the block posts of the occupiers. Cows were fed even during shelling, when rockets flew overhead.
There are a total of 900 cows on the Kolos farm. A third of them are dairy cow. Before the full-scale invasion, they together gave 9.5 tons of milk per day. Since the milk trucks did not come due to the occupation, until the beginning of April all milk had to be poured into the yard.
Dairywoman Natalia Kobylyanska says: "People, who stayed in the village, came and took milk for their families. But they could not take everything. We didn’t know how to spend it. My heart was bleeding. After all, if a cow misses even two milkings, she will get sick by the third."
Yuriy Mudryk, the head of the livestock department of LLC Kolos, notes that during the occupation, taking into account losses in milk, reproduction, gains, livestock, without taking into account machine and tractor fleet, the dairy farm took losses of 12-14 million hryvnias. During the war, milk yields at the LLC Kolos decreased by two and a half times. Six months have passed since the occupation, and the farm still has not reached its previous rates.
In Ukraine, the number of cows is decreasing, and so is milk production.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in the front-line regions, milk production has halved. Across the country - by 15%. In the future, the situation will worsen, because in the first months of the war, many farmers did not inseminate their animals," summarizes the general director of the Association of Milk Producers, Hanna Lavreniuk.
More details - in the video:
Press service of the Association of Milk Producers