Irrigation in the south, before and after

Southern Ukraine is fertile and dry. Agriculture there depended on an irrigation network built in the Soviet period, drawing largely on the Dnipro and its reservoirs.

The inherited system

Large-scale, canal-based, engineered for collective farms of a size that no longer exists. Much of it had already deteriorated before 2022 — canals silted, pumping stations obsolete, and the whole design assuming energy costs that stopped being realistic decades ago.

Even in its degraded state it made the difference between a reliable crop and a gamble on rainfall across a very large area.

What has been lost

The destruction of the Kakhovka dam removed the reservoir that fed a substantial part of the southern network. Land that was irrigated is now dryland, which changes what can be grown there entirely: from vegetables, fruit and high-value crops to drought-tolerant grain and oilseed, with lower yields and lower margin.

What restoration requires

Engineering decisions before construction. Rebuilding the same canal system would restore a design that was already inefficient and energy-hungry. The alternative — drip and pivot systems, on-farm rather than centralised, drawing on boreholes and smaller reservoirs — costs more per hectare and uses far less water and energy.

It also fits the farm structure that actually exists now, which the canal system does not.

The decision to be made

Whether to restore what was there or build what the region needs. It is the same choice that appears everywhere in this reconstruction, and irrigation is the case where the argument for building something different is strongest.

An irrigation system does not come back in pieces once it is lost: the pumping station, the main canal and the in-field network have to work at the same time. On the equipment side that means the investment cannot be divided. What will decide what the south grows is not the seed but whether those three parts can be financed together.