A third of our agricultural lands are drained. Why is melioration a long-term trend in Belarus?

News of the topic Large-scale drainage of swamps in our country began relatively recently - in the late 1960s. A huge number of Soviet specialists were involved in the work, both in terms of area and depth of technological processes: scientists, engineers, specialized builders, power engineers, representatives of forestry and agriculture. Time passed, and the joint efforts brought results: 3.4 million hectares of land were reclaimed from swamps for Belarusians, of which 2.81 million hectares are used today by farmers, which is 35% of the total amount of land put into agricultural circulation. We were not the only ones "pumping" our agricultural potential in a similar way, but while melioration is a thing of the past for most countries of the former USSR, Belarus is the only one among the allies that has preserved and continues to maintain an impressive melioration complex. There are reasons for this, and on the eve of the Meliorator's Day, BELTA correspondents asked about them in detail. Will there be a limit to land reclamation on Belarusian lands? What methods of combating the growing problem of droughts for farmers are being tested in the country? And what do experts say about the development of domestic pond fish farming? In detail in our report. 

Land reclamation is carried out in different areas and with different intensity almost throughout the entire territory of our country. Yes, it mainly covers the Polesie regions - the Gomel and Brest regions, the southern districts of MINSK, but the northwestern and eastern lands of the republic also need drainage, although slightly different technologies are used there. If in the south, drainage by an open network prevails, consisting of creating an extensive network of canals and using machine water lifting, then in the central and northern regions, complex soils make this type of land reclamation inaccessible, forcing specialists to use more labor-intensive closed drainage, and in this case, an outside observer can only guess about the processes taking place underground. 
In the Minsk region in 2025, 20.9 thousand hectares of land will be put into agricultural circulation after melioration

Just over 20 km from the capital. For two months now, residents of the village of Sloboda, Samokhvalovichsky village council, have been watching the felling and uprooting of trees, the preparation of sites for the entry of equipment, the work of excavators digging numerous canals of unequal length. Gordey Slagada, HEAD of the Minsk regional department of melioration and technical supervision, who is present at the site, explains: the task is to lower the groundwater level on an area of ​​about 143 hectares, which will subsequently be transferred to two farms in the Minsk region - the multi-industry "Voskhod" and "Ignatichi". In order to provide farmers with new arable land, land reclamation workers will have to lay a total of 19 km of canals, build closed collectors - and this work will take about nine months from the initial to the final stage. In agriculture, during such a period, they manage to harvest, and even more than one, therefore, following common practice, the areas allocated for melioration are divided into queues and introduced not in one fell swoop, but as the necessary operations are completed. As soon as the meliorators carry out the primary processing of the soil - disking and plowing with bush-marsh plows, planning of the areas - it will be placed at the disposal of agricultural organizations. 
"Every year, in each district, the objects of melioration and the order of their implementation are determined, documents are prepared for consideration by the regional commission, where a work program for the Minsk region for the next year is subsequently formed. At the moment, we are examining the objects that we intend to build in 2026, - explains the head of the Minsk regional department of melioration and technical supervision. - Melioration will affect all districts of the Minsk region. I consider two objects to be the most significant: we are at one, the second is located in the Logoisk district. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is an experimental base for scientists from the Institute of Microbiology of the National Academy of Sciences, who are testing a new drug for the treatment of uprooted banks, accelerating their decomposition. If the domestic product proves effective, we will use it at other sites, which will reduce the costs of eliminating banks from uprooted bushes and reduce the period of fertile land under the banks."
Ivan Lazovsky and Gordey Slagada

This means that reclaimed lands will be transferred to farms even faster, and since they are mainly allocated for hayfields and pastures, the volumes of forage harvesting for Belarusian livestock farming will increase by an order of magnitude, which for Belarus, famous for its dairy and MEAT industries, could become a growth point in the economy. Whether this logical chain is correct, we will inquire at the State Association for Land Reclamation, Water and Fisheries "Belvodkhoz", which oversees the functioning of the entire reclamation complex of the republic, which, by the way, has more than 9.8 thousand employees. 

Reclamation volumes in Belarus are not decreasing

"I would say that the industry received a powerful impetus for development at the end of 2022, when the head of state paid special attention to the problems of melioration. We began to work with optimism: funding increased," comments Dmitry Koldobaev, General DIRECTOR of Belvodkhoz. "Melioration organizations were able to update their fleet of equipment by purchasing single-bucket and multi-bucket excavators, tractors, trucks, and the necessary trailers and mounted units. The increase in the volume of work allowed us to increase revenue and, as a result, raise salaries, which, of course, had a positive effect on the quality of the entire system."
Dmitry Koldobaev
And the statement is easily confirmed by the figures. If in 2021 the reconstruction of melioration systems and cultural and technical melioration were carried out on an area of ​​about 30 thousand hectares, then already in 2023 and 2024 the volume of work increased to 110 thousand hectares, and this year the meliorators have been tasked with not dropping the bar, introducing into agricultural circulation at least 110 thousand hectares. The pace they have taken is already ahead of schedule. In the future, however, experts plan to shift the focus somewhat, paying close attention to the technical operation of melioration systems. So what is the specificity of the work of a meliorator? 
In fact, the main part of the melioration processes remains invisible to the average person, so if you do not observe deep, water-filled canals in the fields, this does not mean at all that a meliorator was not there a year, two or five years ago. As the chief engineer of Belvodkhoz Ivan Lazovsky specifies, in order to make the melioration complex work, it is necessary to start a very complex mechanism of interconnected structures. The scale of the melioration network of our country, numbering 156 thousand km of canals, 1 million km of drainage, 3.2 thousand bridges, 2.2 thousand sluice-regulators, 24.8 thousand pipes - crossings over watercourses, is truly impressive. Most of the listed is a legacy of the Soviet past, however, according to experts, just maintaining complex technical structures in proper condition is not an easy task. In addition to constant care, over time it is necessary to plan and reconstruct, and this is a completely different level of capital investment and skill of the employees who undertake to perform such a task. There is no doubt whether it is worth doing this in principle. Considering the fact that reclaimed lands give a significant increase in crop yields , the answer seems obvious. However, time is not the only factor complicating the work of meliorators - the vagaries of the weather also make adjustments.
The problem is not an excess, but a lack of moisture, or why is drought our new scourge?

Who would have thought a few decades ago that drought, previously associated only with the African continent, the Middle East and the Mediterranean countries, would become an acute problem for the Belarusian agro-industrial complex? 

"Perhaps Belarusians who are far from agriculture and meteorology have not noticed this, but since the middle of last summer, high temperatures for the season have been established in our country. Scientists have recorded a moisture deficit at the beginning of agricultural work this year as well. If before we thought about how to drain excessively wet lands, today we are looking for options for moistening reclaimed agricultural lands, in particular, in the Gomel region, for which we are selecting options for using the Svetlogorsk and Dnieper-Bragin reservoirs, - the chief engineer of "Belvodkhoz" brings journalists up to date. - This case, of course, is not isolated. Pre-project documentation has been prepared for the construction of an irrigation system on an area of ​​over 450 hectares in OAO "Parokhonskoye" in the Brest region." 
It would be fair to note that domestic land reclamation specialists have already developed certain competencies not only in drainage, but also in watering of soils. Two years ago, our specialists completed a project to redirect part of the runoff from the Neman catchment area to the Pripyat catchment area for the needs of the economic complex of Polesie. Of course, only the excess of clean fresh water is borrowed, which previously went into the river systems of neighbors from the north, and now feeds the Belarusians' own fields. In conditions when even renewable natural resources are becoming new gold, this example is extremely indicative.  Land reclamation specialists are looking for

ways to minimize the detrimental impact of dry periods on agriculture , and therefore the economy of the entire country, in conjunction with scientists seriously concerned about weather anomalies. 

"Climate change is usually expressed in average annual figures, but for the reclamation system, instantaneous figures obtained within a month or even a week are much more important, which entails certain difficulties," notes Alexander Anzhenkov, Director of the Institute of Land Reclamation of the National Academy of Sciences. "If in the spring it is necessary to drain significant volumes of excess water to begin sowing, now drought periods have been added to them, when more than 300% of precipitation falls in one month, and less than 20% in the next, and in some regions - up to 4% of the monthly norm. Thus, at some point it is necessary to quickly drain clearly excess water, and in another month the same water must be retained in order to prevent soil moisture from falling below the level of crop wilting. In this case, the harvest, if it suffers, will be minimal."
The summary is as follows: the modern climatedictates its terms to farmers, creating prerequisites for the transition to reclamation systems of two-way regulation, making it possible not only to drain water during periods of excess, but also to retain it during periods of shortage. Such systems have been implemented in Belarus on an area of ​​about 700 thousand hectares. However, the researchers at the Institute of Land Reclamation do not stop searching for effective "anti-drought" solutions and are developing mechanisms that maintain the required water level without human intervention. We are talking about regulator wells, which are already successfully used in several reclamation complexes in the Oktyabrsky and Pinsk districts. And in the future, according to scientists, it would be a good idea to build a system in Belarus capable of receiving the most prompt and comprehensive information about the current state of large watercourses, which will allow making lightning-fast and at the same time rational decisions on the management of reclamation systems. This is what the technological future of the industry looks like. 

Beluga, pike perch, Baltic whitefish: who are they, the outlandish inhabitants of Belarusian reservoirs?

Land reclamation workers, as it has already become clear, contribute to the appearance of natural food products on the tables of Belarusians: there is a part of their work in aromatic bread, fresh vegetables, healthy cereals, tasty MILK and meat. But this list is still incomplete - it lacks fish. And this would be a serious omission, since more than 900 ponds and reservoirs in the republic appeared thanks to land reclamation projects, among which there are quite large ones, on their basis, full-fledged fishery complexes subsequently arose, providing the main volumes of Belarusian pond fish production. Let's take, for example, the experimental fish farms "Selets" in the Berezovsky district and "Lakhva" in Luninets, let's also remember the fish farms "Loktyshi" in the Gantsevichi district, "Volma" in Chervensky or "Krasnaya Sloboda" in Soligorsk, it is appropriate to mention the fish factory "Lyuban". 
"Pond fish farming accounts for more than 96% of commercial fish production. This indicates that pond fish farms have been and will remain the main direction of aquaculture development in the country and the key source of commercial freshwater fish for the domestic market," Denis Zayats, Deputy General Director of Belvodkhoz, who oversees the fisheries complex, predicts. "As in any industry, fish farming has its own nuances that require regulation. I would say that it is necessary to increase the profitability of production, update the motor and tractor fleet, and we still need government support for the purchase of feed." 
However, the invested funds will most likely pay off. Analysis of the last three years shows a steady growth in fish production in the country. Fish farms plan to increase it by another 10% in 2025 and reach 13.6 thousand tons. In industrial conditions, carp is mainly caught in Belarus, which accounts for at least 77% of the total basket. Another 13% of the "catch" is formed by herbivorous fish species and about 4% - valuable ones, the remaining 6% of the farms get crucian carp and pike. Among the new species that have been stocked in our reservoirs, we can highlight beluga, pike perch, and Baltic whitefish. 
According to experts, it is still possible to increase the production of pond fish in Belarus, which, however, requires the involvement of the maximum amount of available areas and the smooth operation of hydraulic structures with a load of at least 90% of capacity. This pleasure is not cheap, especially now that the natural and climatic factor does not play into the hands. It seems unlikely that fish farms suddenly began to lack feed and equipment, but... water. Due to a halving of the amount of precipitation in reservoirs since last autumn, the hydrological level has dropped sharply, which is why it was not possible to fill industrial ponds in full. There will undoubtedly be consequences, but fish farms are in no hurry to sprinkle ashes on their heads, noting the prerequisites for changing the situation for the better.
So what's the bottom line? We still need melioration and will continue to do so in the future, but its focus is gradually shifting. If in previous decades Belarusians were forced to fight excess soil moisture, now they may need all the knowledge and experience to preserve moisture in the ground. New challenges require extraordinary solutions, and Belarusian specialists are optimistic about finding them. 

Vera VASILEVSKAYA, photos by Tatyana MATUSEVICH and the State Organization "Belvodkhoz",
BELTA.