Metro, the Community of St. Petersburg bloggers and the Entrepreneurship Support Fund of the Leningrad Region continues the project,
in which we tell how residents of small towns build a business and who helps them. The project "I am an entrepreneur of the Leningrad region" visited the Kirov region.
By mid-November, agricultural work at Alexey Bykov’s farm in the village of Priladozhsky was already completed: all the potatoes were removed from the fields and put into storage, carrots and beets were packaged. Several sorters work in a huge pavilion, where vegetables are sorted.
“You would come in the summer to see what beauty it is here when the combines are in the field,” Alexey Dmitrievich Bykov, the head of the peasant farm, greets us. - This year I have an excellent harvest! 6,5 thousand tons of products, and usually about 5. This summer, 100 hectares were sown with potatoes, 35 - with carrots and 40 - with beets. Due to the good yield, the average potato even had to be left in the ground, since the storage facility was not designed for such a volume. Only large and smooth were chosen.
A life-long affair
In 2019, the farm celebrated its anniversary - Alexey Bykov created it in 1999, and the entrepreneur celebrated his 70th anniversary in 2017. Almost all life is connected with agriculture.
- I come from the city of Pushkin, - says Alexey Dmitrievich. - At the Leningrad Agricultural Institute he studied as a zoo engineer-poultry breeder by correspondence, since in the 1970s he had already worked at the poultry farm named after V.I. 50th anniversary of the USSR (now "Roskar"). Then he went to master a new complex - Sinyavinsky. He worked there until 1991, and after that he decided to try himself in something else. He was an individual entrepreneur. And since 1999 he decided to produce his own products. This is how my peasant farm appeared.
Alexey Bykov began his business with 1 hectare of land that he planted with potatoes. The next year, it began to expand and leased nearby land, exchanged an old tractor for 65 tons of seed potatoes. On leasing I took a new tractor. A year later, the farmer was harvesting from 18 hectares of land. In 2002, Alexey Bykov began working with a Dutch company that supplies seed potatoes. They also bought carrot and beet seeds from them. So the farmer switched from potato growing to vegetable growing.
“I came to the conclusion that there is a reason for narrow specialization, and there is no need to grow many crops: if the St. Petersburg market“ swallows ”the entire volume of potatoes, carrots and beets, why produce something else,” Alexey Dmitrievich shares his personal experience.
Different regions have their own tastes.
The farmer sells his products in St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Leningrad and Moscow regions. Over the long years of work, he made an interesting observation: each consumer in different regions has his own preferences, in particular, according to variety.
- The variety matters - the product must also be visually attractive - if the carrots are "clumsy", then they will not really take this one, - says an experienced entrepreneur. - Everyone wants a sleek and clean one. Carrots, for example, are in demand in a particular shape. The most running one is of medium size, elongated like a small sausage. There are also large carrots, which are bought for cooking in Korean. Moscow businessmen always take the Chantenay variety from us - it has a triangular shape, with a pointed toe. And in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, they take better elongated carrots for retail sale.
Crops are bought by vegetable depots and neighboring farms.
“Local residents can also come and take a couple of nets of potatoes,” shares Aleksey Dmitrievich. - On fine days we put our seller on the track. The price, of course, for buyers turns out to be lower than the market price - this year they exhibited potatoes at 15 rubles per kilogram. For wholesalers, different prices. We do not dump, we call neighboring farms - we try to keep the price approximately the same.
If you approach wisely - then farming is a profitable business
The main costs of the farm are land leases, seasonal workers (sorters), tractor drivers. The farm has 10 tractors and 3 German combines, for their maintenance in the winter, four repairmen are enough. During harvesting, the tractor driver, as a rule, receives about 2 thousand rubles per shift, sometimes there is a bonus.
- The work is seasonal - we start harvesting early beets in mid-July, then we move on to harvesting early carrots and potatoes, in September we select potatoes for storage, the final part of the harvest is carrots, says Alexey Bykov.
When the “hot season” of harvesting is over, the entrepreneur still has a lot of “paperwork” ahead. It is necessary to draw up documents for obtaining a state subsidy for land reclamation and agricultural machinery (up to 30% of subsidies are allocated by the state for the purchase of tractors).
- I also get about 10 thousand per hectare sown with potatoes, 12-15 thousand for processing a hectare for carrots and beets, - the farmer shares. - Somewhere in April this money is given out, that is, before the sowing of the fields. Farming is profitable if you approach it correctly - any business, if you have knowledge and experience, is profitable. You can lose 2/3 of the crop due to ignorance, or you can produce a profitable crop. It is not possible to buy pesticides worth 2 million rubles for the sake of nature, but you can spend 3-4 million on the same area, and get the same harvest.
Like any farmer, Aleksey Bykov praises his products, noting that his potatoes are more environmentally friendly: “There is no big logistics, as in the case of foreign vegetables, almost immediately from the field gets to the shelves. I downloaded a fresh one - and it is already in St. Petersburg! "
Source: https://www.metronews.ru/