Osatina Group is a private company that has been operating in Croatia for 29 years and exports its products to more than 15 countries. The Group operates in four counties: Osijek-Baranja, Vukovar-Srijem, Brod-Posavina, and Koprivnica-Križevci, where it engages in core activities primarily related to crop production, fruit and vegetable production, milk, meat, and animal feed production, procurement of mercantile goods and trading, wholesale and retail of seed goods, fertilizers, and plant protection products, fattening pigs and bulls, and electricity production (biogas and photovoltaic cells). Currently, it is one of the largest agricultural producers in the Republic of Croatia, with more than 1600 employees and just as many cooperators.
Key to Sustainability and Competitiveness
In Osatina Group, over 29 years of existence, they continuously increase the added value of core production, which is not easy in the context of a constantly changing market that imposes new challenges. They state that market changes caused by the pandemic and crisis confirmed the importance of diversifying processes within a large system and the synergistic effects that arise from them, which are key to sustainability and competitiveness.
– We are one of the few in Europe that have developed our own energy circulation system, which mandates the usability of everything that arises in the production process. Accordingly, we have expanded our core crop, cattle, and pig production by constructing the first biogas plants in Croatia, where we produce our own electricity, using the by-product of one production as a resource for another, all while utilizing the latest technologies and our own know-how. The organic mass that arises as a by-product in several of our productions – solid separator from biogas plants, green mass from greenhouses, cover from mushroom farms, and other organic waste – is processed into humus, which is the primary raw material for producing high-value organic-mineral substrates and soil improvers – they emphasize in Osatina Group.
Further synergistic effects, they explain, have been achieved by launching greenhouse vegetable production on 35 hectares and producing 10,000 tons of mushrooms per year, where the excess thermal energy from biogas plants is used to heat greenhouses in winter, and in summer months, through cooling units, it is converted into energy needed for cooling mushroom farms and distribution centers. Two distribution centers are equipped with the most modern sorting and packaging lines for fruits and vegetables, from which more than 35,000 tons of products are shipped annually from their greenhouses, open production, and orchards, as well as procurement from cooperators.
