Harvesting under drone fire: How Ukrainian farmers work near the front line
Farmers in Ukraine's southern Kherson region are harvesting crops under Russian drone fire, taking electronic warfare systems, drone detectors and shotguns into the fields as they try to protect workers and machinery. For some, the danger has become too great to continue.
Among them is Viktor Hordiienko, whose father - a farmer known for clearing mines from his fields and shooting down Russian drones - was killed in a drone strike last year. Now Hordiienko says continuing to farm near the front is becoming a matter of survival.
Harvesting has become a combat operation
Roman Zavhorodnii does not look much like a farmer heading out to harvest crops. He wears a helmet and body armor and carries a radio, a drone detector and a shotgun. His car contains at least three more drone detectors.
Without them, he says, farmers in this part of Kherson Oblast no longer leave home, let alone go into the fields.
Harvesting now requires an entire team. Two electronic warfare systems are positioned around a field to disrupt incoming drones. Workers armed with shotguns, radios and detectors watch the sky, while farmers have set up their own observation post to warn crews of approaching threats. Tractor drivers carry shotguns in their cabs.
“Harvesting takes place under electronic warfare protection,” Zavhorodnii said. “What we can't detect with our equipment, we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.”
The work has become painfully slow. A grain harvest that once took two or three weeks now stretches for more than two months.
“The drones chased us away, so we fled,” Zavhorodnii said. “Then we go back again. And it goes on like that constantly.”
For farmers closer to the front, even those precautions are sometimes not enough. Hordiienko's fields lie just 12 to 20 kilometers (7 to 12 miles) from Russian positions, in an area he says has become too dangerous for outsiders to reach.
Farmers have been moving equipment farther from the front and scattering machinery and grain across makeshift open-air sites because many of their warehouses have been destroyed. Hordiienko has relocated his equipment four times.
A drone recently struck one such site and wounded one of his workers. Of the four combines his farm once operated, only one remained when hromadske visited.
“It's the same for almost every farmer here,” Hordiienko said. “Someone has either been wounded or killed, or a combine or tractor has burned.”
The price of staying in the fields
The danger comes with an enormous financial cost. Hordiienko says his farm is now $900,000 in debt. Farmers keep millions of dollars' worth of machinery exposed in makeshift storage areas, knowing that a drone costing a fraction of that can destroy it in seconds.
“When you have $2 million or $3 million worth of equipment sitting there, you understand that something costing $700 can fly in and burn a $600,000 combine,” Hordiienko said. “When someone calls you at two in the morning, you already have a nervous tic, because you know something has either been hit or burned, or one of your people has been killed.”
With warehouses destroyed, farmers store grain in long plastic bags in the open. Around 5,000 metric tons had been collected at one site hromadske visited — while roughly the same amount had been left unharvested, some of it lost to fires.
Selling what they manage to harvest brings another problem. With export routes disrupted, local grain prices have fallen sharply, sometimes below production costs, farmers said.
Workers who agree to harvest in dangerous areas are paid roughly twice the usual rate. Some can earn as much as $10,000 a month.
But increasingly, even that is not enough.
After two combines were lost and two workers wounded, Zavhorodnii said many people simply refuse to go back into the fields.
“A lot of farmers, both small and large, have already abandoned everything and left,” he said. “We're still fighting. We want to harvest the sunflower and flax.”
When adaptation is no longer enough
Hordiienko has decided there is a limit to how long his farm can keep operating this way.
“My dream is to harvest the sunflower. And that's it. We're going to stop,” he said. “We'll freeze operations until the war is over.”
He says virtually every farm still operating in the area has had workers killed or wounded, while machinery has repeatedly been damaged or destroyed.
“We held on for as long as we could. It's no longer realistic,” Hordiienko said. “If we keep working here, it's only a matter of time before you're killed.”
Simply moving the business elsewhere is not a realistic option either, he says. Leasing enough land to replace his farm would cost millions of dollars at a time when his equipment has been damaged and his business is already heavily in debt.
Instead, Hordiienko wants the government to temporarily make state-owned farmland in safer regions available to farmers displaced from frontline areas.
“We're not asking for it as a gift,” he said. “Give us state land to use for five or ten years. That's what we're asking for.”
“They hunt me, just like they hunted my father”
For Hordiienko, the decision to stop is also deeply personal.
His father, Oleksandr Hordiienko, became known as “Farmer Rambo” after clearing thousands of anti-tank mines from his fields, shooting down Russian drones with a hunting rifle and buying electronic warfare systems to protect his farm.
He was killed in September 2025 when a Russian drone struck his vehicle in a field.
During hromadske's visit, the sound of an approaching FPV drone suddenly sent Hordiienko and the reporting team running for shelter in an abandoned, damaged house.
“They hunt me. Just like they hunted my father,” Hordiienko said after they drove away. “The guys are already asking me not to go into the fields with them, because when I do, the drones come.”
He says his father's death ultimately taught him when to stop.
“I won't just keep pushing forward and die,” Hordiienko said. “If I can grow food somewhere farther away, I'll be more useful than if I'm simply killed.”
Six days after the interview, Hordiienko told hromadske that the last remaining combine on his farm had gone out to harvest wheat.
A Russian drone caught up with it in the field. After repeated strikes, the machine was completely destroyed by fire.
This material was produced with the support of the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine, a multi-donor initiative funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden. The program aims to strengthen Ukraine's resilience in the face of Russian aggression by providing critical support to communities in cooperation with Ukrainian government institutions, civil society, the media and the private sector.