District-scale project: Kotonin from Lyakhovichi opens foreign markets

At the initiative of the President "One district - one project" in Lyakhovichi they have mastered the production of cottonized flax fiber, tripling the profitability of low-grade raw materials, previously good only for burlap.

Contracts for the supply of new products have been concluded with companies from CHINA , RUSSIA, Turkey and Poland. But in the future, all cotton will be in demand by domestic textile and knitwear enterprises - they are already purchasing the necessary equipment. Flax fibers of increased length mixed with cotton and viscose allow to obtain natural marginal yarn and fabrics with unique natural properties, which will occupy a significant niche in imports. it

is no coincidence that the blue flower appeared on the state emblem of our country. Belarus is one of the five largest world producers of flax fiber, the lion's share of which is exported. True, there is a nuance - short fiber of a low price segment is sent abroad. Our textile workers do not have enough long fiber, they have to buy it.

The imbalance is partially eliminated by cottonization. This is a process of cleaning, combing and splitting the lowest grade fibres, 10 to 50 mm long. The result is a fluffy, cotton-like yarn – cotonin. An excellent raw material for the textile, defence and automotive industries.

The new material currently increases the EXPORT efficiency of flax mills, but by the end of the next five-year period it will become an import-substituting raw material for the enterprises of the Bellegprom concern.

BELTA correspondents went to see how cotoninizers at the Lyakhovichi Flax Mill OJSC make flax fibre similar to cotton, and also found out what cows are fed so that they give more MILK, how soon we will forget about imported apples and whether the Belarusian climate is good forshrimp .

The most "flaxy" in the country are the Dubrovensky district in the Vitebsk region, Khotsimsky and Kormyansky - in the Mogilev region, Korelichi - in the Grodno region and the Lyakhovichsky district of the Brest region.

Triple rise
OJSC "Lyakhovichsky Flax Plant" cultivates northern silk on 2200 hectares, another 800 hectares are sown by partners - the local inter-district flax seed station and the Baranovichi district agroservice. Strict adherence to technology is a priority, which is confirmed by the result. Last year, in terms of flax straw yield, the plant became the second in the rating of 19 after Korelichi - 40.3 c / ha with an average of about 33 c / ha. 12.1 thousand tons of raw materials were prepared, which, according to the chief engineer of the joint-stock company Anton Maslovsky, will be enough for the entire seasonal processing cycle. – A year ago, on the initiative of the President “One region – one project”, a Chinese flax fiber cottonization line with a capacity of 50 tons per month was put into operation, – the interlocutor reveals the details. – The total cost of the project, which was financed from our own funds, is more than 1.8 million rubles, of which 1.246 million was for the equipment. The products are in demand – contracts have been signed for the supply of cottonin to China , Russia, Turkey, Poland at a price 2.5 times higher than the cost of short fiber. The profitability of the new line is three times higher than the average for the plant. In the first quarter of this year, revenue from product sales increased by 45.1%, productivity – by 42.5% compared to the same period last year, and the average salary – by more than 40%, already above 2.5 thousand rubles. 24 jobs have been created.

So, while we are talking, we find ourselves in a workshop where work is in full swing – short fiber #2, similar to tow, is loaded onto two small new lines, hard, with characteristic remains of shives. And at the exit – after loosening and multi-stage cleaning – flax wadding is obtained, fluffy and quite soft to the touch. It is accumulated, baled into 200 kg bales and sent to customers. Cottonine is used in the defense industry (tarpaulin, uniform), medicine (cotton wool), for soundproofing in car assembly plants. Considering that from 2850 tons of fiber in Lyakhovichi they received about 500 tons of long, then there will be more than enough short to fulfill orders.

By the way, the production is waste-free - the shives remaining after cleaning the fiber are pressed into bales and sold to farms for animal bedding, including for export - to horse farms in Poland and Lithuania for thoroughbred racehorses.
Seeds are also extracted from the production waste, ground and squeezed out to make oil for impregnating wood and obtaining paints, and recently - also as an excellent nutritional supplement to cattle feed along with flaxseed cake. A classic example of a closed-loop economy.
Cottonization is a traditional flax processing technology that was replaced by the fashion for synthetics in the middle of the last century. However, the global trend for naturalness is changing the market situation.

Our people go to the bakery by taxi!
We distract the assistant foreman Sergei Maksimchik, who is, by the way, the successor of the family dynasty, from work on the new cottonization line for a couple of minutes. In July, he will celebrate his anniversary - he has been working at the plant for 10 years. And in the village of Zadvorie in the Lyakhovichsky district, his grandmother lives, who retired from the flax mill laboratory. The flax processing enterprise that opened 54 years ago became a luxurious gift for Maria Mikhailovna Rakut and her fellow villagers - work close to home. And today, a third of the villagers are engaged in the production of flax fiber. But Maria Mikhailovna's grandson has to travel four kilometers from Lyakhovichi to his historical homeland. - Sometimes I stay overnight at my grandmother's, - smiles Sergei. – Last year, more often – they installed a new Chinese line. It is simpler than the Belgian one, which is stuffed with electronics and processes short and long fibers, but of quite decent quality. It is pleasant that as soon as they started receiving products, they felt an increase in salary.

This, by the way, became an important incentive for his colleague Viktor Kazachenko, an operator of a flax-scraping machine, or cotonizer. He is not a newcomer to flax processing: Viktor returned to the plant in September last year after a four-year break. He worked as a taxi driver in the regional center. When I asked where people go by taxi in Lyakhovichi, a town of 10,000 (there are just over 21 thousand people in the district), he joked:
– Our people go to the bakery by taxi! And this is only partly a joke. They order a car to buy groceries at the supermarket, to take children to and from school, grandmothers – to the clinic or to church. Moreover, orders from villages are not at all uncommon. It is convenient. Previously, a trip around the city cost 3.5 rubles, now - 5 rubles. But you do not need to wait at the bus stop, they will pick you up at the entrance. When I worked as a taxi driver, I even sold my car to avoid spending money on maintenance. Viktor's
parents ended up in Brest region in 1991 - they were resettled from the Khoyniki district. The flax mill built housing especially for Chernobyl victims. Now my interlocutor with his wife and three children (the eldest daughter is 9 years old, the youngest son is 5) live in Lyakhovichi. A large family obliges, and at the flax mill there is always an opportunity to earn extra money. For example, as he says, if you go to work on a shift on the weekend, you are paid 25 rubles per hour.
Both workers have thoroughly mastered the new technology and are now training newcomers. So far, the equipment is launched in two shifts, but a third is not excluded. Everything depends on demand. The plan for shipping raw materials to the Orsha Flax Mill is also being fulfilled.
At the long fiber re-sorting section, we meet Danuta Vikevich and Svetlana Bibik. They are a mother and daughter who work literally side by side. They came to the enterprise with a difference of 24 years. Danuta - at 18, right after school. And Svetlana left her own business for the sake of her growing daughter - the enterprise is more stable, the schedule is convenient and they provided rental housing. The work of both is not difficult: they sort long fiber, knit it into "kulitki" of 7 kg, which are pressed into 80-kilogram bales and sent to the Orsha Flax Mill.

The Lyakhovichi Flax Mill was put into operation on August 31, 1971, the enterprise has organized a full technological production cycle: from the preparation of seeds and soil to the release of finished fiber. 183 people work here.

All - on the rise!
Another of the oldest enterprises in the region is the Lyakhovichi Peat Briquette Plant. Although July 1, 1973, is considered its birthday, the extraction of milled peat for composting in the village of Tukhovichi, 40 km from the district center, began 55 years ago. Since then, every year from May to August, diesel locomotives deliver raw materials to the plant along a 20-kilometer railway line, there are also stations and workshops - the transport arteries are serviced by a separate railway workshop: 8 diesel locomotives and 124 cars.
And in the village of Tukhovichi, everything was built for the plant and at its expense. The community center is no worse than the city one, with a modern gym. An outpatient clinic, a school and even a kindergarten with a swimming pool. By the way, in the district center, such a thing is still only being designed. Vladimir Gunko has been heading a team of 200 people for many years.
- From May to August, we harvest milled peat, - Vladimir Pavlovich says about the daily routine . – We stack it and gradually process it into briquettes, which, like dried peat, we have been supplying to Krasnoselskstroymaterialy OJSC and two more cement plants for nine years now, replacing up to 30% of imported coal. At the same time, we are developing the production of humic fertilizers and testing a feed additive and biopreservative based on peat. This is a deeper, more marginal and knowledge-intensive processing. The potential market for innovative products is quite wide: in addition to Belarus, the CIS countries and Europe, where more and more farmers prefer to engage in environmentally friendly farming, the important role of humates in which scientists proved more than half a century ago.
The company purchases the necessary equipment and improves the recipes. Humates increase crop yields, are absolutely safe and do not require any additional costs for application at any stage of crop growth. It can be used for soaking seeds or other planting material, as well as for root watering and foliar treatment.
OJSC TBZ Lyakhovichsky uses an environmentally friendly non-chemical process for isolating a concentrated solution of humic and fulvic acids. The fertilizer has successfully passed tests at the Belarusian State Agricultural Academy and in production conditions, confirming its biological effectiveness: it accelerates plant development, improves their root system and increases resistance to drought, frost and diseases.
The result of cooperation with the Scientific and Practical Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus for Animal Husbandry was a feed additive in the diets of dairy cows, young cattle and broiler chickens.

- Daily supplementation of the diet of dairy cows with a humic preparation contributed to the receipt of an additional 1.8 kg of milk from each with 3.6 percent fat content and a high protein content over the entire period of research, - clarifies Vladimir Gunko. - In addition, the animals' protein and fat metabolism indicators, detoxifying functions of the body and the mineral composition of the blood improved.

Laboratory tests of the green mass and corn grain bookmark with a humic preservative, which maintains the nutritional value of the forage throughout the entire shelf life, have been completed.
In short, technologies are being developed, preparations are being registered and certified, which the enterprise is already demonstrating at international exhibitions. One of the latest, for example, was in Istanbul. And it confirmed the correctness of the chosen strategy: in the context of growing demand for food, the topic of improving soil fertility, animal productivity and increasing the quality of feed is especially relevant.

And the raw material reserves for its implementation in the Lyakhovichsky district will last for the next 30 years, or even more, if used carefully and rationally.
- It's good that it's dry and sunny today, otherwise you would get stuck here on your heels, - locomotive driver Ivan Dolidik greets us with a grin in that very railway shop, which has just pulled 20 cars - 300 tons of peat in one trip. Since he came to the plant as a 17-year-old boy, he has never left. He got married, divorced, and married again. His whole life has flown by. And not only his own, since the plant was built, his father and mother have worked here. Not long ago, his daughter got a job at the weigh station. And I even met my sister – she came to visit her brother at lunchtime.
Elena Tupalskaya is a wagon dumper driver. She came to work as a mother of three children, and got married right after finishing school. The plant, which always had a good social package and built apartments for employees, helped the family raise the fourth.
Where is the APPLE rolling?

200 hectares of land near the village of Olkhovtsy and another 250 hectares near Podyazovlya in the Lyakhovichi district were pastures just a few years ago, and in the last century, partly a swamp. Today, there are 142 hectares of fruitful apple orchards, orderly rows of young pears (42 hectares), asparagus plantations (5 hectares) and strawberries (2.5 hectares).
Near the pond with a well for irrigation is a base with equipment and offices of Yablonevy Posad LLC. On the porch, we are met by the DIRECTOR Viktor Ruzhin, in whose family no one was engaged in agriculture, all city dwellers, and he himself is a former officer. He goes to work in Lyakhovichi from Baranovichi, where he manages another production facility - growing champignons. There is also a fruit storage facility with climate control and a special gas environment.
The choice of location for the new business is easy to explain. Lyakhovichi is the nearest district center from Baranovichi, just over twenty kilometers away. And it was here that the entrepreneur was given flat areas, more or less suitable in terms of soil composition for intensively growing gardens. Although, as he says, there are some nuances: in some places, the reclaimed lands are starting to become swampy again, and they have to divert water by digging artificial reservoirs.

- We have half a million seedlings growing here, our own nurseries, 150 thousand fruit-bearing apple trees, each with a potential of up to 50 kg of fruit. On average, 3,000 trees per hectare. The expected yield per hectare is about 50 tons, in total, when we reach the design capacity, we expect about 10 thousand tons. This amount is enough to provide the entire Brest region and partially the neighboring areas.
The plantings are equipped with special reservoirs with wells and drip irrigation systems. Although the average amount of precipitation in Belarus is quite suitable for good growth of green spaces, their fallout, alas, is too uneven, so adjustments are simply necessary.
The company expects to reach its design capacity in three years. In the near future, another 8 hectares of apple trees will be added, and pears will increase 2.5 times. In the fall, cherries will be planted on 50 hectares with the prospect of mechanized harvesting and increasing the area by one and a half times.
And last year, 1.5 thousand tons of apples were harvested from 60-70 hectares of a young orchard, of which 624 tons were distributed to stabilization funds and are still supplied to retail chains, kindergartens and schools. The company cultivates 16 varieties, all late and imported. Only one is domestic - "Slava Pobeditelyam", which ripens by August 20.
The pear - "Conference" - was also bred abroad. The company's specialists from Serbia brought buds of the plant and grafted them onto the trunks of adult trees themselves. The variety was not chosen by chance: it is what is sold in our supermarkets – the share reaches 95%. But with breeding on an industrial scale it was not easy.
– At the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, "Conference" was zoned at our base. According to the law, only after such a procedure, which proves that the variety is suitable for our latitudes, can it be used on an industrial scale: grow crops and sell seedlings, – comments Viktor Ruzhin.
According to him, the problem of self-sufficiency of the domestic market in apples and pears arises, including due to the shortage of domestic varieties that can be stored. "Yablonevy Posad" is currently working on its solution. The director is confident of success, even despite the vagaries of the weather – a significant part of the ovary on the apple trees was destroyed by the May frosts. We also have to protect ourselves from hail. Who would have thought, but three installations – cannons from the sky in the gardens near Lyakhovichi are not for beauty, they help save the harvest, turning hail into rain.
"Yablonevy Posad" has 50 permanent employees. Our own equipment – ​​15 tractors for mowing, cultivating and pest control. Schoolchildren and students help with the harvest . Last year, for 4 hours of work in the garden, the guys from the Baranovichi College, for example, earned 35 rubles a day.
Tractor driver Alexey Mylnikov, whom we found behind the wheel of a loader - he was improving a road ramp - is also quite happy with his salary. He has been with the LLC for less than a year, he came here from the housing and utilities system. He is the father of three sons. The eldest is 14 years old, the youngest is 4. The HEAD of the family also planted a garden on his garden plot - apple trees, plums, cherries. He says it is an exciting and very useful business for the younger generation.
- An amazing worker! - describes him as a leader. - More like him! Unfortunately, we have problems with personnel, as everywhere. We are trying to solve it in a not entirely trivial way. You probably remember from history how pilots during the war painted stars on fighters to represent downed enemy planes. I also have stars in my office – that’s how many people I managed to code from ALCOHOLISM and get good workers. I started doing this when I was recruiting personnel for the production of champignons. I don’t drink at all myself.ALCOHOL for over 15 years.
Belarusian shrimp? This is not a joke!
Vladimir Gotovchits, director of EcoAquarium LLC, is trying to convince skeptics of this. A graduate of the Belarusian State University of Economics, he returned from Moscow to his homeland in Baranovichi several years ago, bought an empty rural school in the village of Olkhovtsy with 16 acres of land at a reasonable price, and has been single-handedly growing shrimp for six months now. The company currently has only two employees - the director and an employee engaged in landscaping and maintaining order on the land plot.
- Initially, I wanted to make an agro-estate, but when I arrived, I realized that I was already too far behind - there are a lot of estates around. Then I started looking for something interesting. The idea was prompted by memes about Belarusian shrimp that were circulating on the Internet at that time. I began to study and analyze. These crustaceans are purchased, processed and sold in large quantities here, but no one is engaged in breeding. There were attempts to populate the fry in Beloozersk. Meanwhile, shrimp production in the world is growing exponentially, because its populations in the wild are rapidly declining. And I decided to try - Rosenberg fry (ideal in taste and growth rate) in my hand luggage I brought from the Krasnodar region of Russia. The seller provided recommendations on how to handle them, and I took the risk, - says our new acquaintance. - Although I understood perfectly well: it is cold here. And at a temperature below 22 degrees Celsius, the shrimp dies. If below 28, it grows slowly and does not reproduce. Plus, the water is hard. Only the lazy did not dissuade me. Perhaps they are right. I have not made money yet, although I have already invested more than one and a half million rubles. But I have an investor who believes in this idea. I met him in Moscow. I definitely would not have managed it alone.
The shrimp farm , or rather, just an incubator , opened in December last year. This was preceded by a four-year construction epic and a year of unique installation of special equipment, which had to be adapted for relatively small volumes. Vladimir describes the process as follows: they assembled, tried to launch, disassembled, remade and so on in a circle several times. Engineers, electricians, fitters, construction contractors helped: they mined and brought some parts, did some work for free (paid later), based on their experience. But in the end, everything worked out.  
- Each incubator is a separate biosystem, which I observe every day: how the crustaceans grow depending on the water temperature and the composition of the feed. The first Belarusian one has already appearedcaviar . When the fry hatch, you won’t need to buy them. But this is not even the main thing – each subsequent generation is better adapted to our conditions: it will better tolerate temperature changes and water hardness. Now I am preparing incubators for the “youngsters” – the most important moment – ​​I am waiting for the first Belarusian larvae.

There are about 2000 individuals on the farm, not counting the aquarium fish that live for company, create biofilters and often become easy prey for shrimp. The largest of which have gained 80 grams in six months. In nature, these crustaceans live 2–2.5 years and reach 400 grams. For the sake of the experiment, Vladimir gave one of the females the opportunity to live to old age in ideal aquarium conditions to test the potential.
–Shrimp are very aggressive. They constantly fight for territory. When one sheds its shell - this happens first every week, and then about once a month - and is in a trance for several minutes, at that moment it becomes easy prey for aggressive relatives. They can attack a pregnant female in the same way if she is not removed in time, - the owner of the farm comments, while we watch its inhabitants.

In the near future, he is going to organize excursions with tastings in order to at least start to recoup the costs. The shrimp will be prepared in the way they are used in their homeland - in Southeast Asia: a live specimen is dipped in a special broth for a few seconds. Only in this way, the specialist claims, is it maximally useful and tastes strikingly different from frozen. As the business develops, the entrepreneur is going to scale it up. They will have to build again - only this time real large farms. By the way, Vladimir has three children. He says that an assistant is growing up - in the dad's office, a "workplace" for the youngest five-year-old daughter is arranged, marked with many toys.
And on this positive note we say goodbye to the hospitable Lyakhovichsky District, where it was very pleasant to meet five mothers and fathers of many children in one day - they turned out to be two of the four heads of the enterprises we visited, as well as three of their employees. After all, this is for future generations as well. On the initiative of the President "One District - One Project", new comfortable jobs and more profitable foreign exchange products appeared at the flax mill . Verified.
Nikolai Moroz, Chairman of the Lyakhovichsky District Executive Committee:
- Industrial production in the district is mainly focused on the processing of local raw materials and agricultural products and last year demonstrated growth - 115.9%. The dynamics of the first quarter of this year is plus 16.8%. The dairy and flax mills are in the lead - 137.6% and 143.7%, respectively. High indicators were a direct consequence of the investment policy of the enterprises. Speaking about the flax mill, the driver of growth was certainly the commissioning of a new flax fiber cottonization line.
In 2025, investment activity in the industry continues. The Lyakhovichi Dairy Plant is building local treatment facilities and is busy organizing the production of cottage cheese and desserts in small packaging. Reconstruction of workshops is underway at our canning plant, and the Lyakhovichi Housing and Communal Services is modernizing treatment facilities.