Ukrainian farmers risk their lives as war continues amid sowing season

euronews.com:

A growing food crisis has been worsened by Ukraine's inability to ship millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products as the country remains under attack.

The country is one of the world's largest exporters of wheat, corn and sunflower oil, but the war and a Russian blockade of its ports have halted much of that flow, endangering world food supplies. Many of those ports are now also heavily mined.

So are many of the fields recaptured around Ukraine's second-biggest city Kharkiv, in the northeastern part of the country.

Russian and Ukrainian forces are still fighting in the countryside north of the city, and work in much of the farmland has not yet resumed in time for seeding.

Fields littered by unexploded artillery shells or too close to the frontline are too dangerous to venture in, and farming equipment and warehouses are largely destroyed.

But as shelling continues a few kilometres north, tractors seed as much land as possible, as fast as possible, wherever possible. Working in tandem, the drivers coordinate with each other by sight to avoid the craters left by the strikes.

"We don't have strikes right now, but in other fields, there is shelling and there are rockets (left on the ground), we drive past them and still seed. What can we do?" said one tractor driver seeding sunflowers in the village of Cherkaska Lozova.

After recapturing many of their fields from the Russians, they must now contend with a lack of working equipment.

"The situation now is that we don't have machines,” said farmworker Mikhaylo Petrushenko. “We recovered the land that is not mined where we can work, but not the machines because they were mostly destroyed."

But even if farmers do manage to secure their next harvest, there may not be space