Getting grain to a ship

A tonne of wheat leaving a field in Poltava region and a tonne of wheat loaded onto a vessel in Pivdennyi are the same wheat at very different prices. The difference is logistics, and for a farmer it is the difference between a good year and a poor one.

The chain, step by step

Harvest, then on-farm handling: drying if moisture is high, cleaning, and storage. Farms with their own silos can hold and sell when they choose. Farms without them must sell at harvest, when everyone else is also selling and the price is at its annual low. That single fact explains most of the difference in profitability between otherwise similar farms.

Then transport to an elevator, usually by road over poor local surfaces in trucks that are frequently overloaded. Then rail to the port, which is the cheapest leg per tonne-kilometre and the one most subject to wagon availability. Then the terminal: unloading, storage, blending to specification, and loading.

Where the cost actually sits

Not in any single step. It sits in the transitions — every transfer between modes is handling, waiting and a queue. A truck queue at an elevator in October can run to many hours. Wagon shortages in a good harvest year are chronic. Draft limitations at some terminals mean a vessel cannot load to full capacity.

What improved, and how

Private investment in deep-water terminal capacity, which raised throughput and shortened vessel turnaround. On-farm storage, which is unglamorous and among the highest-return investments in the sector. River transport on the Dnipro, revived by a law that made it commercially viable. And after 2022, an entire alternative overland chain built under pressure.

My interest here is professional in an oblique way. I sell the plant that surfaces the roads those trucks drive on, and I can tell you that the road between a farm and an elevator is a grain logistics asset that almost nobody counts as one.

The gap between the farm gate and the port sits in the same place in my business too: most of the cost is in moving and handling rather than in producing. What determines a farmer's income is the yield and also how many kilometres away the nearest silo is. That is why the highest-return investment in agriculture is not seed but storage and roads.