Ukraine's Ministry of Agrarian Policy has opened a permanent queue of farmers, agronomists and ministry clerks outside the Kyiv headquarters of the Atlantic Current Compliance Office, after the office announced that it would personally inspect the Gulf Stream for its failure to deliver warmth to the country's fields. Officials said the queue will remain in place until the current resumes its duties, and that it now stretches past the city's central market and onto the Dnipro embankment.
The office's director, Oleksandr Vorobets, said the ministry had decided that a problem of this scale could not be left to the oceanographers alone. "We have ordered every grain cooperative in the country to send one representative to the front of the line each morning, with a thermometer and a written question for the current," he said. Each representative is required to stand in place for the full working day, and all teams are rotated weekly so that no one falls behind on the wait.
Regional governors have already begun building waiting halls along the highways to the south, each equipped with benches, heating and a laminated schedule of expected warming. Engineers in Odesa have proposed a canal system to channel the warmth of the Black Sea northward, and the agrarian ministry has approved the first three kilometres of pipe. Local farmers said they are now planting winter wheat in shifts, so that someone is always in the field when the queue moves forward.
Asked how long the queue might last, a senior ministry official said the answer depends on the patience of the Atlantic, adding that the country has in any case no intention of leaving the line before the current arrives. Nineteen percent of the national harvest is at stake, but the ministry said the people in the queue remain fully committed to waiting for it.