Astarta” agricultural holding, the largest sugar producer in the country, has started harvesting wheat and rapeseed in Poltava region. The harvesting process in the Western region will start in the middle of July, the press service of the holding announced on Facebook on Friday.
According to the message, Astarta plans to harvest early grains from an area of almost 57,000 hectares in 2023, including winter wheat from 43,000 hectares.
“Despite the existing challenges – more than 400 mobilized workers, a serious increase in the cost of production resources, the work in the mode of constant air rapture, the possibility of overlapping reaping of winter rape and wheat – we have qualitatively and timely prepared for harvesting. We carried out repairs, the necessary amount of agricultural equipment is ready, we have good condition of crops and good yield potential. And most importantly, the people – there are preserved and well prepared teams “- said the director of agricultural production Vadim Skrypnyk.
Astarta” said that they managed to sell almost the entire harvest last year, so grain elevators of the holding are ready to receive the new harvest. During the season of 2023, the harvesting will be accompanied by the implementation of digital products AgriChain, in particular the new module of AgriChain Logistics, aimed at the automation and efficient management of all processes.
“Together with agronomics, logistics, elevator and commercial services of “Astarta” we developed a mathematical model that comprehensively solves the transport task and allows making the most optimal plan of product placement on the company’s own and third-party elevators or, if necessary, involve reserve storage options,” – explained AgriChain Director Natalia Bogacheva, emphasizing the importance of this issue during the harvesting campaign.
According to her information, the IT-division reinforced the control system of collection, transportation and delivery to the place of harvest unloading, and it also brought the transportation routing to a new level, the system of access to loading trucks via NFC technology, the digital control system “friend-or-foe”, the notification system and rapid response to abnormal situations on the routes.
During the current harvesting campaign it is also planned to implement hourly dispatching of product delivery from the field to the storage locations through the work orders system, which will help to avoid queues, idle time, increase vehicle turnover and choose the best route.
“Astarta is a vertically integrated agro-industrial holding operating in eight regions of Ukraine. It consists of six sugar factories, farms with land bank of 220 thousand hectares, dairy farms with 22 thousand cattle, oil extraction plant in Globino (Poltava region), seven elevators and biogas complex.
Agroholding increased its net profit in 2021 14 times compared to 2020 – up to EUR 122.5 mln, EBITDA – 1.8 times, up to EUR 201.5 mln. Its revenue increased by 18.2% up to EUR 491.35 mln, one third of which (EUR 170 mln) was generated by sugar production and sales.
