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On a bracingly cold morning last October, I drove south from Kyiv and into Ukraine’s agricultural heartland past fields of yellowed corn and green shoots of winter barley just beginning to emerge. With me was Olha Tarasenko, an environmental activist with the NGO Ecoaction, which has spent years investigating complaints about the arrival of massive poultry farms in the region. Dozens have been established in recent years, most of them owned by one company: Myronivsky Hliboproduct, or MHP, which was founded by a Ukrainian billionaire and is Europe’s largest poultry producer.
Outside the village of Olyanytsya, the air grew heavy with the smell of chicken shit. We approached a row of long, white buildings resembling Amazon warehouses, each holding as many as thirty-eight thousand birds, and Tarasenko told me to duck down. MHP had threatened her colleagues and other activists before for bringing journalists here. I snapped a few photos as surreptitiously as I could. On the road back into town, we passed a bus of workers heading the opposite direction, toward the chicken plant. A sign on the side of the vehicle said: “MHP is always close by.”
