Dreaming of a better life in the old garden.
(Baonghean.vn) - With the dream of changing his life on his old garden plot, a young man boldly brought cantaloupe seeds to plant on the barren sandy soil in Nghi An commune, Vinh city. And right from the first harvest, he had a sweet crop.
Born in 1995, Luong Hai Du, residing in Hoa Hop hamlet, Nghi An commune, Vinh city, graduated from Vinh University of Technology and Education in 2017 with a major in electrical engineering.
Graduating with the dream of creating a new, stable, and independent life for himself, what to do and where to start to fulfill his passions and aspirations of youth and assert himself was a difficult problem for him - a young man fresh out of school, starting with nothing but an electrical engineering degree.
Born and raised in a not-so-well-off rural area, Du was always preoccupied with his dreams and aspirations. Seeing the rural landscape with its traditional intercropping farming, on barren, low-yielding fields, and now with farmers showing little enthusiasm for farming, he was deeply concerned.
Unwilling to accept the persistent poverty, the farmers here, despite having vast tracts of land that were mostly left fallow, harbored a dream of transforming the barren, sandy fields and gardens of their homeland into plots and gardens that would produce high-income crops.
To realize that dream, he discussed it with his parents and siblings, who joined forces to help create the initial conditions for him to go abroad as a hired worker and accumulate capital.
He worked as a laborer in Japan from 2017 to 2022 before returning to his hometown. With some capital and a long-held determination to start his own business, he initially searched for information on social media to learn how to cultivate high-yield agricultural crops suitable for the local soil. He chose a crop called "greenhouse cantaloupe."
Fortunately for him, this first project always had the support and companionship of his father, Mr. Luong Van Can, 58 years old, an experienced and eager-to-learn farmer.
With his father's support, he focused on contacting farming facilities and learning cultivation techniques. A 600m² greenhouse farm was built with investment.2on an area of over 2,000 square meters2 This is my family's garden.
Visiting his garden, we were greeted by a captivating green landscape with rows of straight melon plants, brightly illuminated by the sweltering summer sun, and hundreds of plump, golden melons ready for harvest.
He shared: “After returning from working in Japan at the end of 2022, and celebrating the Lunar New Year at the end of February 2023, I asked my parents for permission to get married and settle down. After getting married and with my vision in mind, in early March this year I decided to plant my first crop of melons, a type called Huynh Long yellow netted melon, originating from Malaysia. One crop consists of 1,500 plants, yielding around 2.5 to 3 tons, with a retail price of around 60,000 VND/kg.”
This variety of yellow melon is suitable for planting from February to August, thriving in the warm, sunny weather of Nghe An province. Fortunately, this season benefited from favorable weather conditions and suitable soil, resulting in healthy seedlings and high-quality fruit, with each plant producing one fruit weighing 2-2.2 kg. Preliminary estimates suggest an income of over 100 million VND from this crop, with a net profit exceeding 70 million VND.
"The first batch was a bit expensive, but what makes me happiest is achieving my dream, gaining the secrets of the trade, and next season, with more experience, I will confidently invest in expanding production," Du confided.
As we parted ways with him, we couldn't help but feel joyful, not only because his achievements had been rewarded, but also because of the self-reliance and entrepreneurship of the village's young people, because somewhere out there, people were wasting their time and energy on pointless things.
Congratulations on your success, and congratulations to all the young people who dare to think outside the box and create new models on the very same old garden plot.
Through this new agricultural product model, we hope that more and more young people and residents of Nghi An will have access to new ways of doing business, creating more products that are the culmination of agricultural labor. This will transform the land and fields, which are valuable resources and cherished assets preserved by our ancestors for generations, into fertile land with valuable products to develop family economies and contribute to the prosperity and beauty of this rural area.
