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Local farmer has Ukrainian connections through Farm Bureau

A delegation of Ukrainian women involved in agriculture visited Fusilier Family Farms in Manchester on May 8th, 2019 (reprinted with permission from Michigan Farm Bureau)

In 2013, Michigan��farmers traveled to Ukraine as part of a Michigan Farm Bureau-sponsored event to learn more about sunflower oils, grains, and how each country agricultural practices differed. One of the attendees was Travis Fusilier.��

In May 2019, Fusilier Family Farms in Manchester hosted six Ukrainian women involved in agriculture as one of their several stops in Michigan and Ohio over an eight-day agronomy- and business-focused visit sponsored by The Open World Leadership Center, an agency of the U.S. Congress, and hosted by The Great Lakes Consortium for International Training and Development (GLC) of Toledo, Ohio.��

The women included an apple farmer who produced juice for the wholesale market, a garlic farmer setting up a cooperative, an assistant professor teaching agriculture at a Kyiv university, a business woman specializing in finance, the head of a Landscape Park in L’viv, and a high school principal. They were optimistic both about what methods they’d learned they could take back with them and about the political landscape.

Tetiana Artiukh, an assistant professor at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences in Kyiv, stated in a Michigan Farm Bureau article by Steve Paradiso, “Our country has a great opportunity for development in agriculture,” Artiukh said. “Because of that, I think it good we were able to come to the U.S. and visit farms like the Fusiliers’ … we learned ideas we can take back to Ukraine. And with our new president, (Volodymyr Zelenskiy), to be in office soon with his great team, we hope to have total support for agriculture in our country.”

On the 24th of February, 2022, Russia��invaded��Ukraine.��With the number of civil causalities in the thousands, the invasion has triggered Europe’s largest refugee crisis since��World War��II, and has led to more than 4.1 million Ukrainians leaving the country and a quarter of the population��displaced.��

Mitch Galloway in an article “’Unfathomable’: Michigan farmers’ friends, family under siege in Ukraine” for Farm News Media connected with some of the Michigan farmers who traveled to the Ukraine in 2013, including Fusilier. The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from the author:��

While in Ukraine, Travis Fusilier noticed a farming community in flux.

“They went from a collectivize (farming) to people owning the land,” said Fusilier, who manages Fusilier Family Farm in Manchester. “There was a lot of confusion on how they should divvy out the land to make it fair. However, there was a lot of optimism for Ukraine at the time. It was changing pretty rapidly as money came in from the West.”

A few years after the trip to Ukraine, the Fusiliers��hosted��a Ukrainian delegation who remarked on Michigan rocky soils compared to theirs.

“It’s crazy because a bunch of people my age, in their 40s, and even in the low 50s were optimistic about the future,” Fusilier said. “Now it being taken away from them. It’s just crazy to think about it. At one point, they thought they could control their future, and now someone else is trying to control it for them.”

Fusilier Facebook-friended dozens of Ukrainian farmers after the 2013 trip.

He sees their posts, their worries about Russia.

He can’t help but think about them.

“I think their farmland comes second right now,” he said.

Read Galloway’s on the Michigan Farm News website.

by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and a founder of the Manchester Mirror.