One of Dejid’s children is disabled, which placed an added burden on her as a struggling unemployed parent. Her husband had no permanent job, relying on low-paid, short-term seasonal work to provide for his family. The situation was often grim, but despite the hardships, Dejid never lost hope that their situation would improve.
That began to happen seven years ago when she turned her hand to backyard farming as a way to earn extra money. She initially harvested 10kg of potatoes for her household consumption and sold the small amount of surplus, which brought in a modest return.
Inspired, she expanded her farm to include turnips, carrots, cabbages and some leafy greens, from which she was able to earn MNT 200,000-300,000 annually. It wasn’t much, but she realised she was on the right track.
Pondering how to increase the earnings from her farm, she came into contact with the Mongolian Vegetable Project in 2016. The project supplied her with a 4m x 8m plastic greenhouse, a drip irrigation set and 200 seedlings that enabled her to hone her growing skills with a new addition to her garden: strawberries.
By the end of the 2016 growing season, she had raised 300 strawberry seedlings to sell to her neighbours and people in her local area. Given that the market price for a single seedling is MNT 5000, she made MNT 1.5 million from her seedling sales.
Dejid has also learnt to dry vegetables, which fetch a 2-3 times higher price than raw vegetables, making her confident that she will this year earn MNT 2 million alone from the sale of dried vegetables.
She said going on field trips to the farms of fellow smallholders and larger companies made her believe she should take her backyard farming to new heights.
“Learning new technologies for drying of vegetables and growing new plants to earn additional income will make this job feasible,” she said “However, nothing can match seeing my children’s faces when they beam with delight nibbling the strawberries. That’s real happiness. Now I know opportunities are always there.”
