Orchards are being revived in the Ryazan region

Since 2016, the individual entrepreneur Saadat Ayyubova and her family have been reviving a gardening business in the Starozhilovsky district of the Ryazan region. The Ayyubovs started with 200 hectares of land, and now they cultivate more than 500 hectares – these are apple orchards, currants, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, honeysuckle.
In the autumn of 2023, they plan to plant another 105 hectares of an apple orchard in the village of Khrushchevo. Now spring barley has been sown on this area. We purchased agricultural machinery, trailed units for growing grain crops, built a warehouse for grain storage.
The Ayyubovs are creating their own network of retail outlets, where they will sell frozen and fresh fruits and berries all year round: in the summer they will install 50 retail pavilions in Ryazan and several districts of the region. Now they are building a fruit storage, an office building, expanding the car park, buying Gazelles to import products.
The farm constantly employs 50 people, under the contract – another 100 people, and during the picking season up to 500 people come – local residents and everyone.
In 2022, at the initiative of the Ayubovs, the Starozhilovsky Berries and Fruits agricultural consumer marketing cooperative was created.
In the future, the Ayyubovs also plan to engage in animal husbandry: open a farm for fattening meat cattle.
“Our garden is occupied by more than 300 hectares – these are 4 lanes and each has 8 blocks (10-12 hectares each), all of them are protected by plantings. The forest belts remained from Soviet times, and we uprooted the main garden, which used to be in Khrushchev, cultivated the soil, and planted new trees. They will be 3.5 meters in height. We cut them every year in order to properly form apple trees and then it was convenient to take care of them. And 5 quarters (about 50 hectares) are under berry crops. All of them are on drip irrigation, i.e. they are watered and properly fed according to the laboratory data,” said Agronomist Lyudmila Guseva.