The main features of today’s farmers have become perseverance, perseverance, diligence and ingenuity.
Farming is an important part of the economic policy of our country. People employed in this area enjoy various measures of state support. Being a farmer is not just a profession, it is more of a vocation. The labor of a farmer has long ceased to be only work on the land, but has grown into a broad specialization, the development of which requires a lot of effort.
There are two agricultural supply and marketing consumer cooperatives in the Borisovsky district: Alliance Farmervest and Borisovskaya Strawberry. The first unites milk producers and is engaged in the production of cheeses and other dairy products already known throughout Russia. Marina Fabre manages the cooperative. The chairman of the second association is Vitaliy Babenko. In 2016, his cooperative brought together growers of garden berries. Before that, the chairman had significant experience of working on the land: since 1995 he grew vegetables, in 2009 he became a member of the Belogorye Family Farms program.
In 2016, the cooperative received a grant for the development of the material and technical base in the amount of 6.150 million rubles, which was used to purchase agricultural machinery, trucks and a refrigerator. Now, within the framework of the cooperative, the farmer cultivates a hectare of strawberries, 50 acres of protected ground is set aside for late varieties of raspberries, there are greenhouses with Black Jack blackberries. In addition, Vitaliy Babenko also operates as an individual entrepreneur. At the beginning, he had only 25 acres of land, now – 550 hectares, corn is planted on 360 of them. For the third year, the farmer sells it to Borisov Farms. The novelty of this year is 10 hectares of potatoes, 85 hectares of perennial grass for haylage, 60 hectares of inconvenient crops were also sown with grass. I bought seedlings of 66 colors of chrysanthemums in a Moscow nursery and planted them on 25 acres.
“It would probably be wrong to separate work within the framework of a cooperative and individual entrepreneurship,” Vitaly Babenko noted, “after all, when the supply and marketing agricultural consumer cooperative appeared, I already had a base that had been accumulated over 21 years, and I added my half a million to the grant rubles. Of course, it was a huge help from the state, which still brings results. If we talk about the berry direction, then I expect a good harvest of blackberries. From each bush of my biennials, I must collect 15 kilograms of berries. This is the first harvest, the second – on young shoots – will be in August. I have had raspberries for more than a year, and I decided to transfer one of the greenhouses under it (I didn’t really like the variety) for cucumbers, although I hadn’t been engaged in vegetables for almost ten years. And here 1,200 bushes were planted in the greenhouse “on cloth”. We’ve been harvesting for a month now.”
This year Vitaliy Babenko allocated 15 acres for gourds, tomatoes, and eggplants. The seed material of potatoes was taken in Belarus, the resulting crop is planned to be stored in storage, and what to do next with it, time will tell.
“Now, how is the implementation going? Wholesalers come and take along with berries and vegetables. If we talk about plans, then I want to build a recreation center on 50 hectares of my inconveniences: rural tourism is now a promising direction, especially since in my case it can be combined with gastrotourism. I now have 14 greenhouses, over time I want to replace them with modern ones, so that both the roof and the sides open. I have already prepared areas for the first four, and I will add more every year. I will install them myself. On the basis of the former collective farm named after Lenin, I am opening a special workshop, there is already an invited specialist from the Krasnodar Territory with experience in this matter, ”said Vitaly Babenko.
Let’s talk about the quality of vegetables and berries without boasting – Russian products are better and tastier. After all, our farmers use ordinary soil for its cultivation, while imported ones mainly grow on hydroponics, artificial soil. Of course, they use imported seeds and seedlings, but Russian nurseries are already working just as well. For example, Vitaly Babenko took corn seeds in Kabardino-Balkaria, raspberries – in Adygea, potatoes – in Bryansk. By the way, he himself can already grow planting material for both closed and open ground.
The main features of today’s farmers have become perseverance, perseverance, diligence and ingenuity. Vitaly Babenko is a living example of this. Not in vain for his work, in addition to diplomas and thanks from the district and ministerial levels, he became the laureate of the V.Ya. Gorin. Thanks to such people, the volume of production and the variety of food products are growing in our country from year to year.
