Every tonne of wheat that leaves the river port of Ostrova passes through the hands of a few dozen people before it reaches the sea. In this episode of our audio series, Tomás Reyes follows a single cargo from the elevator to the river mouth and hears from four of them. Press play on the player below for the full 28-minute episode, recorded on the quay, on a barge and in a very small office. The text below tells the same story in shorter form.
The elevator foreman
The elevator at Ostrova is a row of concrete silos 42 metres high, built in the years when the river carried more grain than it does now. Dmytro Kalyna has worked there for nineteen years and runs the day shift from a glass booth at the top of the conveyor tower. From his chair he can see the trucks queueing on the approach road and the barges moored three deep at the berth.
On the recording you can hear what he hears all day: the rattle of wheat falling through a steel chute, a warning horn, a radio playing in the next booth. "When it is quiet, something is broken," he says. On a good day the elevator loads 9,000 tonnes. On the day we visited, a conveyor belt tore just after lunch and the total was 6,200.
The barge skipper
Olena Marchuk skippers a pushboat that moves four barges at a time, each carrying about 1,500 tonnes, down 180 kilometres of river to a transhipment point at the coast. The trip takes around 30 hours if the water is deep enough. In late summer, when the river drops, she loads the barges lighter to keep them off the sandbanks, which means more trips for the same cargo.
She has a paper chart of the channel on the wheelhouse table, annotated in three colours of pen, and a phone app that she trusts less. "The river changes its mind every spring," she says in the episode, over the steady thump of the diesel. "The app finds out at the end of summer."
The surveyor's scoop
Before any of the wheat changes hands, an independent surveyor samples it. Andriy Bondar climbs into each barge hold with a long brass probe and pulls wheat from a set of fixed points. The samples go to a lab in a converted shipping container beside the quay, where they are tested for moisture, protein and foreign matter. The results set the price: a cargo that tests half a point low on protein can lose several dollars a tonne.
Bondar has seen plenty of disputes. "Everyone agrees on the weight," he says. "Nobody agrees on the quality until the paper says so, and sometimes not after."
The broker in the city
The final voice is Katya Hollis, a marine insurance broker at Tern & Mallory, who arranges cover for cargoes leaving the river. Her office is 2,000 kilometres from Ostrova and has a single window facing a brick wall. She prices the grain voyage week by week, adjusting for the route, the ship's age and the security situation along the coast. Premiums on the route have fallen by about a third since the spring, she says, as ships kept moving without incident and more underwriters returned.
"The grain does not care about any of this," Hollis says. "But the bank that lends against it does, and the bank reads my certificate before it reads anything else."
Where the river ends
The episode ends at the transhipment point, where Marchuk's barges tie up alongside a 60,000-tonne bulk carrier and a floating crane lifts the wheat aboard in grabs of 25 tonnes. It takes two days to fill the ship. For more on the ships that move bulk cargo, see our Shipping desk.
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