For seven months each year he runs two large Ukrainian farms that produce crops such as canola, sunflowers, wheat and barley. And for the rest of the year he lives in Ballarat, where he spends time with family and works as a consultant for farmers with properties in western Victoria and Tasmania. It's a work pattern he's been following for four years. He spends three stints in Ukraine in every 12-month period, arranging his schedule so that he is there when most needed. Before he was hired by the farm's operators, he had done some work in Ukraine on a consulting basis. Lawrence Richmond in a paddock of barley, near Lexton, Victoria. Credit:Brad Collis

In modern farming, a growing number of farmers seem to be living in towns and travelling to their property each day, or living on their home block and farming another property a few kilometres away. But Mr Richmond's farming arrangements are clearly unique. An added benefit is that he doesn't see too much of winter at all, in either hemisphere, although he returned to Victoria this week for a three-week stint. Next week he will attend the Australian Grains Industry Conference in Melbourne, and participate in a session examining whether Black Sea grain, grown in countries such as Ukraine and Russia, is "challenging" Australia's grain industry. "As far as I'm concerned, it's got some advantages over Australia and it's got some disadvantages," he said, when asked to compare the two countries. "The soil quality is absolutely fantastic compared to Australian soil. On the pure farming side, there's lots of advantages and our production costs are much less per tonne here in Ukraine than what they could ever be in Australia," he said.

Lawrence Richmond (right) examines a Ukraine wheat crop with agronomist Taras Stepanovich. Production costs per tonne of Ukrainian grain, he estimates, are about half what they are in Australia, largely due to far smaller annual "land access costs". This means Ukrainian farmers have money to spend on other things. "We have a few more staff floating around. One-third of our staff are security, so we don't lose product ... And we dare not leave anything of value in the field at all," he said. "A couple of years ago we grew a corn crop and we actually had to have security in the corn crop 24 hours a day before we harvested it."

Even when he's in Ballarat, he still keeps tabs on the Ukrainian properties. "I'm still involved in the active management ... via Skype and email and all that sort of stuff," he said.