Agro 2011 - Food and Drink Dispays

There were more than a dozen Oblasts (provinces) with very elaborate booths at the show, displaying all the different brands of food and beverages produced there.  Not sure what purpose it served other that bragging rights.  It was not a consumer show so it wouldn't increase market share or anything.  But the displays were impressive.  There are hundreds of brands of sausage and cheese in Ukraine and dozens of brands of beer and vodka.  This is a carry over from Soviet times when every little town had a processing plant.  Even now anyone with cows or pigs wants to build a processing plant and run a store to sell direct..

When Tanya was managing the government procurement contracts between the collective farms and the processors in P'yatikhatski Raion in the last years of the USSR and the first few years of independence, there were 28 collective farms, four bread factories, four milk factories and three meat factories (they were called factories).