Agrotrade, an agricultural holding company whose land bank is concentrated in the Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Poltava regions, has noted lower efficiency in frontline areas and would like to strengthen its business model through relocation.
“We want to grow. We want to strengthen our business model by relocating our land bank and forming land clusters in safer regions,” said Agrotrade CEO Serhiy Nechyporuk at the Agro Finance 2025 Conference, recently held by Oschadbank.
“We tell the banks: give us funds, we will relocate our land bank, create a successful cluster, for example, in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, and we will be more resilient. And bankers tell us: well, let’s finance it with your own funds, and then we’ll think about how we can refinance you,” he described the discussion with banks.
According to Nechyporuk, bankers are ignoring the sound business logic of the agricultural holding, which has strong agronomic and agrotechnological expertise that it can scale up, but at the same time they are refusing to increase financing limits due to the need for greater loan reserves for a company operating in frontline regions.
Currently, according to him, some of the company’s land is located 10 km from the line of combat.
“It is difficult to be effective when there are constantly REBs working in the fields: we have now adopted a precision farming strategy (using drones) and, unfortunately, we cannot implement it on two clusters (out of the company’s five clusters),” Nechyporuk gave an example.
He added that the company also has “agronomic combat” bonuses for agronomists who go out to certain fields that are considered risky.
According to the CEO of Agrotrade, if we do not focus on supporting the frontline regions now, a “wild economic frontline field” will soon appear there.
Nechyporuk also noted a decline in the trend toward processing products due to a shortage of raw materials, which arose against the backdrop of a reduction in Ukraine’s agricultural land bank from 25 million hectares to 20 million hectares due to Russia’s full-scale aggression.
“There used to be a very strong trend towards processing agricultural products, but unfortunately, it has now declined. We probably invested a lot in it, but now there is not as much raw material because we are losing our land,” he said.
The Agrotrade Group of Companies is a vertically integrated holding company covering the entire agro-industrial cycle (production, processing, storage, and trade in agricultural products). It cultivates over 70,000 hectares of land. Its main crops are sunflower, corn, winter wheat, soybeans, and rapeseed. It has its own network of elevators with a one-time storage capacity of 570,000 tons.
The group also produces hybrid seeds of corn, sunflower, barley, and winter wheat. In 2014, a seed plant with a capacity of 20,000 tons of seeds per year was built on the basis of the Kolos seed farm (Kharkiv region).
The founder of Agrotrade is Vsevolod Kozhemyako.
