When an adventure becomes a life’s work and passion
This article was featured in Eurofish Magazine 1 2024.
The Vilshanka farm is located in Cherkasy region in central Ukraine between the Vilshanka river estuary and the right bank of the Dnipro river. During Soviet times, the facility belonged to a collective farm, and when Ukraine gained independence, several attempts were made to re-organise the farm’s production, though without success. The facility was privatised at the beginning of 2000, and Oleg Ponomarenko, Vilshanka’s CEO, joined the company in 2010. The new leader’s main tasks were to increase the farm’s productivity, renovate and automate fish farming processes, and breed new species of freshwater fish.
This is the fifth in a series of articles in the Eurofish Magazine dedicated to seafood businesses in Ukraine and how they work and survive during the war.
Frame-patterned carp is the major species in focus
An economist by training, Mr Ponomarenko did not know much about aquaculture. Offering him a job, the major stakeholder in Vilshanka said that the property was huge and underdeveloped, and something had to be done about it. “What to grow, and how to grow it?!”, recalls Mr Ponomarenko. “I went to Kyiv and bought 4,000 fingerlings of Siberian sturgeon, bester, sterlet, Russian sturgeon—between six and nine grams—and dropped them into a small pond… This was a pure adventure, but there was no way back!”
Today, Vilshanka has a full-system pond farm with semi-intensive production on a total area of 1,066 ha, including six grow-out ponds with a total of 104 ha, eight wintering ponds with a total of 18 ha, three rearing ponds with a total of 86 ha, and 800 ha of estuary for restocking and harvesting. In addition, the company has a fish feed production unit which fully satisfies the farm’s demands.
The major species farmed is frame-patterned carp, which is a variety of common carp (Cyprinus carpio) developed through selective breeding. The fish has mirror-like scales around the edges of the body, which form a kind of frame. Frame-patterned carp was chosen for its good taste and small number of scales, which makes the cooking preparation easier. Carp grows in polyculture with pike, grass carp, and pike-perch, and reaches a commercial size of 1.5-2 kilos in two years. The company has its own broodstock and a hatchery. The annual production of carp is about 200 tonnes.
The range of farmed species also includes sturgeons: Siberian, sterlet, and bester. Four years ago, says Mr Ponomarenko, we decided to introduce paddlefish and already before the New Year we had our first harvest: four-year old fish weighing 8 kilos. Currently, we have about four tonnes of paddlefish and we plan to establish a broodstock to close the production cycle. Vilshanks also produces sturgeon caviar—the roe is gently extracted from the fish without damaging or stressing it.
The company employs 21 persons working full-time and seasonally hires 10-15 people extra. Through cooperation with universities in Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, Vilshanka also hosts interns, mainly students studying aquaculture.
Dealing with local sales and local mentality
All Vilshanka’s fish is sold live from the farm gate. In the past, there were attempts to cooperate with retail chains, but their demand was 100-200 kilos one to two times a week—too low to remain solvent, and too much effort compared to the benefit. Today the company works mainly with third parties that further distribute the production around the country. Vilshanka also sells to a regional processing plant, where fish is cut into fillets and sent frozen to Canada and the US. The frame-patterned carp is in high demand due to its quality and taste—regular tests of the water and pond bottom soil, and high-quality feed ensure flesh of the right density and free of the taste of slime and mud. The company also carries out the genetic selection process aiming to increase the yield by obtaining a smaller head and tail and to minimise the volume of intestines, so the fish body would look like a small plate.
Vilshanka is also known as a resort. The company offers a recreational facility with cottages and a restaurant located on a 20 ha pond, where recreational fishermen can come solo or with family and friends—to fish, eat, and enjoy life. It took Mr Ponomarenko a significant effort to change these fishermen’s attitude: during the Soviet era, people thought that what belonged to a collective farm also belonged to them, and for private properties in the post-Soviet era poaching is a major problem. Now the locals near Vilshanka show more respect and they are given a chance to fish at the resort for a reasonable fee.
Life persists despite the ongoing war
At the beginning of the war there was no understanding of what the future might bring, explains Mr Ponomarenko. We had a lot of undergrown carp of about 600 grams, so we stocked them in ponds without understanding what would happen next. We were running out of fish feed and there was a lot of uncertainty whether we would be able to feed our fish in the future. However, he had to do it, as there are several villages in the area, and a home for elderly people, and all the people living there needed food.
Those days there were a lot of refugees coming into the area. Many of them just jumped in their cars as they were – no extra clothes or food, sometimes with only two litres of gasoline in a plastic bottle to refuel. Vilshanka accommodated refugees in the resort facility’s cottages, helping people with necessary supplies and sometimes with jobs. Surrounding villages also sheltered a lot of refugees, and the farm supplied them with free fish. The company also donated fish to canneries and never denied those knocking on its door.
Despite the turbulence, Vilshanka persists: in 2022-2023 two cultivation ponds and two wintering ponds were constructed, and measures are constantly taken to improve the state of the ponds and water quality. It is important to move forward, says
Mr Ponomarenko. I cannot just drop something I paid for with 14 years of my life. We have to produce food, we have to pay taxes to the state, and provide jobs to people—and I feel responsible for it.
Having a job during the war is important not only from an income point of view. One of Vilshanka’s employees whose son is fighting in the war said that the job helps her to take her mind off constant stress and worries, and to be useful instead. That is how to survive in wartime.
Can a war teach anyone anything?
Sure, says Mr Ponomarenko. The war taught me to value life, time, and people. The war has shown the true face of people and filtered out quite a few bad apples from our surroundings. Before the war we could postpone things till “tomorrow or after tomorrow”—these days we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so we try to do as much as we can now, today. While we are alive, we have to keep moving forward without thinking about tomorrow, without thinking if the war will end tomorrow or not—there’s still no way back.
Aleksandra Petersen
aleksandra@eurofish.dk