Oleksiy Kustov, Co-Founder of Alebor Group, shared his thoughts regarding the future of Ukrainian grain in “Nichna Varta” (“Night Watch”) TV show.
He noted that there is a problem of lack of silos for long-term storage of grain in Ukraine.
Experts predict that, due to the war, this season Ukraine will harvest only 60% of its grain, that is 40% less than last year.
As for long-term storage, currently we havesilos with total storage capacity of 57 million tons. For comparison, last year we harvested about 106 million tons of grain. 61.5 million tons were delivered for export. Considering 10 million tons used internally, we had about 35 million tons of grain remained for long-term storage. Thus, storage deficit is 40 million tons.
As for the types of existing storage facilities, approximately 47% are flat storage or concrete silo bins built back in the Soviet Union.
Under these conditions, indeed, it is possible to store grain for more than a year, roughly up to 2-3 years.
The remained 53% are modern metal silos. They are good from the point of view of energy consumption, speed of construction and transhipment. But there is still a question on long-term grain storage.
Now we are observing a temperature regime of about 35 degrees.
It means, that inside a silo bin, grain is heated up to about 50 degrees. This is very close to the temperature of rapeseed drying (60 degrees).
Thus, oilseed crops can be stored in metal silos for no more than one year, because later they will lose their quality characteristics.
Oleksiy Kustov admits, that construction of terminals on the western borders of Ukraine can improve the situation with grain storage and export.
“In our practice we had the experience of total completion of a turnkey construction and commissioning a silo in the field, just within 6 months”, – said the co-founder of the group of companies.
Alebor Group’s management team has a plan for the construction of a terminal for grain transshipment from a broad track to narrow, theEuropean one. For this purpose, 15 hectares of land is already purchased.
As the next step, our specialists will develop logistics of grain transportation to the port of Constantia in Romania.
In September, we plan to deliver the first railcar with grain, and reach the rate of 1.5 thousand tons per day.
And already on January 1, we plan to build a terminal with storage capacity of 60,000 tons, and transshipment capacity of 3,000 tons of grain per day.
These are our plans we want to implement in the near future, to ensure food security inUkraine.
If we talk about today, unfortunately, the situation with grain storage and export is very bad, due to rather complicated and long logistics of grain transportation.
But we strongly believe that the most of Ukrainian agricompanies will optimize their capacities and establish logistics via alternativeroutes, to enable further grain export and restore their full potential.
