Huta Ivan Mykolayovych

Founder of “Mriya”

Ivan Huta is one of the most striking examples of post-Soviet agricultural entrepreneurship: a man who began with 50 hectares and in twenty years built one of the largest agroholdings in the country. In 1992, together with his wife Klavdiya, he founded the farming enterprise “Mriya.” He started with 50 hectares, where he tried growing 15 crops simultaneously — foreign agrarians advised focusing on potatoes.

From potatoes to 295 thousand hectares

The strategy worked. “Mriya” transformed into a vertically integrated agroholding with its own infrastructure, a fleet of agricultural machinery, and the cultivation of 165,000 hectares in Western Ukraine — wheat, rapeseed, corn, sugar beets, potatoes, buckwheat, barley, peas, soy, sunflower. In 2012, Focus magazine ranked Huta third among the 20 most successful agrarians in Ukraine — the land bank at that time was 295,000 hectares. In 2009, he was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine. His wife Klavdiya became a member of the supervisory board of the Mriya group of companies, coordinating the financial and agricultural directions.

Default of $1.3 billion and the end of the empire

In August 2014, “Mriya” declared a technical default — the company was unable to repay its creditors. The total debt of the agroholding was about $1.3 billion. This became one of the loudest corporate collapses in the Ukrainian agricultural sector: thousands of farmers in Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi and Lviv regions who rented land from “Mriya” were left in limbo. Foreign creditors — including the EBRD and several international banks — suffered massive losses. Huta stepped down from the leadership of the holding, the company was later restructured, but only the name remains of the former “Mriya.”