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American Beef Could Find Niche Market In Ukraine
Visiting at a social reception at the Chief of Missions residence in Kyiv, Ukraine
is on the left Larry White, owner of LL International, Bismarck, North Dakota with
Taras Kutovyi, Ministry of Agrararian Policy And Food Of Ukraine.
Photo by John LaRose
5th in a 10 Part Series
JOHN M. LAROSE
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER
MidAmerica Farmer Grower
KYIV, UKRAINE
Beef producers could find the right trade partner in Ukraine, if they pursue the market. Larry White, owner of LL International, Bismarck, North Dakota an agribusiness consulting firm that also produces oils, sunflower and flax oil said he thinks the prospect should be reviewed.
White traveled on the recent USDA Trade Mission led by USDA Acting Deputy Secretary Michael Scuse to Ukraine and Romania.
“I’ve done a lot of work in the former Soviet Union in Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Russia, and the Ukraine,” he said. “My focus is on livestock development, on bringing livestock from the United States into those countries and introducing them to the American Angus cattle. I have continually worked with companies in Russia.”
White knows the state of the beef industry in Ukraine, and he believes there’s a niche market for high marbled meat there. “With a growing middle class and income increasing, these people will buy a little higher product than what they’re eating now,” White added.
The supply of beef is adequate now, but it’s the quality that is the difference, their animals are primarily all grass fed. There isn’t a lot of grain put in them. This is the opening the United States should try to fill,” White said.
“There’s very little beef, and most of these may have a dual purpose, they milk the Simmentals and Holsteins and raise a calf off of them. Their cattle that you see walking around the villages, have a dairy cross in them someplace. Nothing is purebred,” White said. “The number of beef cattle is very low. I never saw a purebred herd of anything.”
“I think you could get the hotel, retail, high-end restaurant trade,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of possibilities with genetics to sell high quality semen and bulls into this county. The U.S. cattleman need to get started in the Ukrainian beef industry. Our embryos might be the easiest way to get into the market,” stated White.
“I think what they’re eating right now are the dairy animals, the male side of it and they leave them intact so they are actually essentially eating bull meat,” White explained. “It’s very dark cuts compared to what you see in the United States. The color of the meat is a lot darker red than what is found in U.S. Markets, ours is kind of a bright cherry red and we identify that with quality. Theirs has no marbling at all, I mean it’s pretty much devoid. By our standard, it would have a commercial or utility type grade on it.” They use a lot of moisture cooking, boiling, in order to get by with it.”
“There’s a lot of opportunity in Ukraine for high quality beef,” he stressed. “I noticed that when we toured the supermarkets, they had all those price cuts; they even had the American cuts, the high-end cuts were there, but they didn’t have a price on the American cuts, they had it boxed separate in a cage.”
White didn’t know who was selling American beef to them, but they were identifying it as American. They were aging it right there, dry aging it.
“There was one place I visited called Good Foods, a huge fine liquor establishment with vegetables, cheeses, meats and all those very high-end edibles,’ he reported. “When I walked out the door people were backed up for about two blocks to get in. It was nearly closing time, and there were automobiles pulling in to park. The lineup was Bentleys, Lexis, and BMWs and such, all pulling in there to buy something they deem as quality and something they wanted to have. There’s some money in Kyiv whether you believe it or not. It’s like anyplace else in the world, when the pay scale moves up people tend to have more meat and a lot better quality food.” stated White.
White said Ukraine pork industry is pretty good and producers have leaned their pigs considerably. “We visited a farm that had land raised pigs, pretty much European genetics coming out of Denmark and Sweden. We were up in the Sumy region next to the Russian border and the farmer we visited is doing an excellent job with pork production. His facilities weren’t as elaborate as what we have in the states, but the pigs were very well taken care of and very healthy looking.”
“There tends to be a trend toward the leaner effect, with less fat in their diet; however, there’s still the straight fat that some Ukrainian’s prefer in their pork.” The trend toward more lean pork has come about over the past 20 years. The demand has changed.“I think this next generation has gotten used to eating more of the red meat and leaving the white meat behind,” White said.
There could be some export opportunity for the pork industry, since White never saw any cured hams and that kind of thing in the markets. “The whole ham was fresh, so you could make a ham steak or something out of it, but there were no cured hams or picnics like ham found in America, stated White.
“You could buy hams and take it home and cure it yourself, but there must not be a large market for it or they would have it in the store,” said White. “I didn’t see the real sliced hams or anything like that in any of the stores, even in the high-end stores.” The Ukrainians eat more pork than beef.
They eat a lot of poultry and a lot of rabbit. Rabbit was always in the supermarket. “They tend to leave the feet on them with a little bit of fur so that you could identify it as a rabbit and not a cat,” White explained. “That’s what the guy told me when I was in the market.”
White didn’t know if the change in their diet preference has anything to do with the expansion of the soybean industry. “I don’t know, but I think that anytime you raise something that would be beneficial to certain species of livestock that will happen,” he said. “They’re probably crushing soybeans so they do have soybean meal there when they squeeze out the soybean oils.”
“Being a far north climate it’s possible in the past Ukrainians didn’t have the soybean varieties that would mature in time. It’s the same thing with corn. The corn wouldn’t mature out right, but with today’s earlier maturing varieties they can export. That’s changed dramatically. Ukrainians in years past chopped most of the corn into silage; in fact, even today you see very few hay fields. Most of the corn not exported is fed into the dairy industry,” White said.
“When we went up to Sumy, it was corn on corn on corn, and that was about 300 kilometers or 200 miles of nothing but corn,” he said. “I shouldn’t say nothing, there was a little bit of sunflowers and a small acreage of wheat. They said it was really dry last fall and it got too late before they got it planted so they quit. They didn’t put any in and left those acres idle until spring and then put in corn.”
“With the soil type that it has, Ukraine is a sleeping giant literally,” White said. If GMO were allowed in the country, who knows what would happen? ∆
Editors Note: Next Weeks Articles Are; Forged Friendships Bring Rewards To U.S., Romania and a second article Foreign Agriculture Service is U.S. Link To The World
JOHN M. LAROSE: Publisher MidAmerica Farmer Grower
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER: Senior Staff Writer, MidAmerica Farmer Grower
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