The Agrotrade agricultural holding has begun harvesting soybeans, sunflowers, and industrial hemp, according to a statement posted on its Facebook page.
“The campaign is underway simultaneously in several regions: soybeans in Kharkiv and Sumy regions, sunflowers in Kharkiv region, and industrial hemp in Chernihiv region. Currently, 9% of soybeans, 7% of sunflowers, and 54% of industrial hemp have been harvested,” the agricultural holding company said.
According to Alexander Ovsyannik, director of the agro-industrial department, industrial hemp has been harvested on almost half of the area, with yields within the norm.
“This is the third year of experimenting with this crop, and in the fall, we will decide whether to scale up this direction. As for soybeans and sunflowers, it is too early to draw conclusions: early soybeans were affected by drought, while late soybeans are still in good condition, and the situation with sunflowers depends on the region,” Ovsyannik said.
In the 2025 season, Agrotrade used 23 combine harvesters and about 60 trucks to quickly transport the harvest.
As reported, in 2025, Agrotrade allocated almost 13,000 hectares for soybeans, 11,000 hectares for sunflowers, and 333.5 hectares for industrial hemp.
The Agrotrade group of companies is a vertically integrated holding company with a full agro-industrial cycle (production, processing, storage, and trade in agricultural products). It cultivates more than 70,000 hectares of land in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Poltava, and Kharkiv regions. 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). In 2018, Agrotrade launched its own brand, Agroseeds.
The founder of Agrotrade is Vsevolod Kozhemyako.
The Ma’Rizhany Industrial Park (Zhytomyr region) plans to double its industrial hemp processing capacity, according to Dmytro Kysilevsky, deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Economic Development, on Facebook.
He noted that as of early August 2025, the plant will be able to process 10,000 tons of hemp per year. Increasing the area under cultivation to 4,000 hectares will allow the plant to reach a processing capacity of 20,000 tons of raw materials per year. In the 2025 season, there will be more than 1,600 hectares of industrial crops within a 20 km radius of the park.
“The Ma’Rizhany industrial park is actively persuading farmers in the Zhytomyr region to switch from unstable and politicized grain supplies to the European Union to long-term contracts with Ukrainian customers for a new, promising, and traditional crop for Ukraine. Well, the demand for hemp fiber is growing on the world market, which is the best financial guarantee for farms that will become partners of the industrial park,” Kysilevsky said.
The MP expressed confidence that the industrial park has enough free space to accommodate the next stages of deep processing of industrial hemp.
In May 2025, the largest industrial hemp primary processing enterprise in Ukraine began operations in the Ma’Rizhany industrial park. Ma’Rizhany Hemp Company renovated an old flax factory and built a modern production facility with a capacity of 14,000 tons per year of long fiber for the textile industry. It is expected that related processing products, such as short fiber and chaff, will find application in nonwoven materials (heat and sound insulation), paper, building blocks, chipboard, and bioplastics.
As reported, IP “Ma’Ryzhany” occupies about 30 hectares, the territory of a former flax processing plant. It will be the first park in Europe for the primary processing of bast crops. It was entered in the Register of IPs in August 2024. It is planned to create more than 700 jobs.
Specialists of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine (NAAS) have bred and presented a new variety of universal sowing hemp “Sofia”, in which both the fibers of the plant and its seeds are suitable for use.
Its cultivation provides opportunities for the development of various sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including the defense industry, which is especially important in the context of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the website of the institution on Friday.
According to NAAS, technical hemp is the basis for the production of gunpowder and raw material for ropes and parachutes. Hemp fibers are lighter than synthetic Kevlar, which is used to make body armor, and armor plates made from hemp can withstand armor-piercing bullets.
NAAN clarified that hemp is used as a fabric for sewing natural military clothing, underwear, and can also be used for construction and building insulation.
A new variety of hemp was presented the day before during the Hemp Fest in the Sumy region. The festival was attended by 80 leading scientists, farmers, businessmen and experts in the hemp industry from ten regions of Ukraine.
During the event, among other things, issues of legislative regulation in the field of industrial hemp and plant processing were raised, depending on the needs of the Ukrainian economy.
