A graduate of a British business school has become a farmer and believes that the size of the farm does not matter.
Egor Sklyarov debunks the stereotypical view of farmers. The largest business schools in the world under the MBA program train future top managers, professional managers - ed.). Now in the Ukrainian agricultural sector there is a whole layer of modern advanced managers who understand market processes. ”
Egor Sklyarov is a graduate of a prestigious Ukrainian university, KNU named after Taras Shevchenko, specializing in International Economics. And besides, a master of a British university - the business school of Leeds University (Leeds, UK) in banking and international finance.
The young man has been a farmer for six years. He is a co-founder and financial director of the Seym-Agro farm (Sumy region). The company has 2300 hectares of land at its disposal.
Sklyarov says that farm size does not matter in terms of profitability. “To this day, there is debate about which model of agricultural business to adopt in Ukraine - European, where the average farm size is three hectares, or Argentinean with huge latifundia?”
The farmer gives an example of a study by specialists at the Kiev School of Economics. For 17 years, they observed the activities of agricultural enterprises of all types and sizes in Ukraine. It showed that the success of the farm does not depend on the area of land, but on management efficiency, that is, on how much income per hectare brings.
“70% of the land in Ukraine is not included in the holdings, but is cultivated by independent agricultural companies. But if you compare their activities with farmers in Canada, where the conditions for farming, rainfall, amount of land are similar to Ukrainian, then a shocking picture comes out. The added value of Canadian farms is 15 times higher than Ukrainian. At the same time, Canadians have an average farm size 4 times smaller than ours. They have about 500 hectares, we have 2000. This means that Ukraine has enormous potential for the development of small and medium-sized farming. ”
Another stereotype that Sklyarov is trying to debunk is that small farms cannot work for export.
“Export lots can be stably formed even with 500 hectares of land. All export contracts of famous traders start with 500 tons of grain. And a batch of 500 tons of corn can be generated even with 50 hectares. ”
