Sunny Verghese Participates in Wheat Harvesting at Rusmolco

Last week Sunny, Sridhar Krishnan, Senior Managing Director & Regional Head, Chris Brett, Head – CR&S and Raj Vardhan, Country Head, Olam Russia, were on a working visit to Olam’s commercial farming and dairy production business at Rusmolco, Penza. They visited all the completed and ongoing projects that Olam has undertaken at Penza to get a first-hand sense of how the team has coped with normal business as well as several project executions progressing simultaneously.

  DAY-1 of the visit covered –

Troisk Drying unit and grain storage base. This base can dry grains upto 1000 mt /day and effectively store about 20,000 mt of dry grain in silo bags that is ready for discharge. He also saw the design and foundation progress on a multipurpose seed plant construction that will be useful not only for high quality seeds needed in commercial agriculture but also for alfa-alfa and annual grasses required in dairy production.

Pachelma Agri central base and elevator. This base is central to the commercial agriculture land base and is used to control the same. We are progressing at a fast pace with construction of a 100,000 mt capacity elevator with drying capacity of over 4000 mt /day which is quite ideal for large scale agriculture where harvesting speed and drying capacity become critical value drivers for profitable agriculture. The elevator is being constructed in stages in such a manner that we are already able to us the drying capabilities and get substantial value even in the current harvest season.

Arshinovka dairy farm. This is a 4600 cow dairy farm which has over 6000 heads of livestock including young stock on single premises. This is one of the largest and most modern dairy farms in the world and it got fully populated in 2014. Given the consistent reproductive performance at the dairy, we are now rapidly progressing through the natural stage of herd stabilisation.

The visit also covered several farms with standing crops and where harvesting was in progress. It is evident that there is consistent improvement on yields being generated and EBITDA/ha being achieved. Rusmolco farms are already registering some of the best yields (some are biological yield expectations at the moment as harvest is not yet complete) in Penza / Volga region. We expect to achieve over 7 mt/ha on corn, 50mt/ ha of sugar beets and get to 2 mt/ha on Soya. 

The highlight of Sunny’s visit was that the Agri and dairy teams at Rusmolco (which has nearly 1200 employees) got a chance to directly interact with Olam’s top management and convey their future goals, plans and commitment to the business.