Much of the fallow land lies in a vast swath along the front line of the war, while other fields are in areas recently retaken by Ukrainian forces, she says.

Becker-Reshef says that while overall, Ukraine has been able to maintain its agricultural output this year, the abandoned fields have already cost the nation around $2 billion in lost crops.

Precise estimates of how much artillery ammunition has been used in the war so far are hard to come by, but Russian and Ukrainian forces are firing thousands of rounds a day, according to Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"These can lay in the ground for over a hundred years and still be lethal," says Iain Overton, the executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British non-profit that focuses on the harm caused by explosive weapons.

Still, Overton says, the amount of unexploded ordnance, land mines, and toxic pollution in farmland along the front line will make returning those fields to production a "gargantuan task."

The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam earlier this year drained a massive reservoir and left nearly a thousand miles of irrigation channels without a source of water.

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