Europe’s largest poultry farm, on Ukraine’s occupied Black Sea coast, has lost almost four million chickens to thirst and starvation during the country’s war with Russia. It falls to plant manager Andriy Chirkov to clean up the disaster left behind.
The war has already disrupted Ukraine’s prodigious exports of wheat, sunflower oil and other produce, boosting global food costs. It has also halted production at the Chornobaivske chicken farm, situated in a southern part of Ukraine that has experienced some of the heaviest fighting. The facility, which typically exports about one billion eggs a year, is just one of several to have been hit in one of the world’s biggest producers.