Just a few kilometers away from Chisinau, Mihail and Ludmila Croitoru together with their three children and their families set up a successful farming business, growing vegetables in protected soil. With a lot of hard work and determination, the family has built greenhouses stretching on about 1.5 hectares, where they grow tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, several varieties of pepper and pumpkins. Started by the parents as an additional source of income, the farming business has soon turned into a successful business to which all the family members contribute.
“We’ve been growing vegetables since the early 90s. We did it in open field many years, but after hail had caused us big losses several years in a row, we understood how important it is to protect our crops”, Mihail says, adding that when his family decided to grow vegetables in protected soil they built their first eight tunnel-type greenhouses in 2013. In the following two years they invested the money made from selling vegetables in other 10 greenhouses.
Mihail’s ambitions, however, went beyond this. During the seminars and experience-sharing visits to Holland and Israel the greenhouses that he saw there impressed him so much that he decided to build greenhouses according to European standards. Today, besides the tunnel-type greenhouses, the Croitoru family has two modern gutter-connected greenhouses, partially fitted out with automated technological processes, with a total area of about 5000 square meters, and they are building other two similar greenhouses.
Mihail Croitoru thinks that his dream to buy the equipment necessary to build the greenhouses would not have come true without the Compact financial support he received through the 2KR hire-purchase program implemented by the Sustainable Development Account Moldova.
“The opportunity to buy equipment in installments through 2KR seemed attractive. What we had to do is to submit a business plan, the package of required documents and to our satisfaction we became the beneficiaries of this program and built our first gutter-connected greenhouse in 2018”, he says cheerfully. Because the loan terms involved various incentives like tax exemptions and reduced costs related to financing, the Croitoru family applied again for the hire-purchase financing in order to build the other three greenhouses.
The farmers are happy with the yield - 15 tons of tomatoes and cucumbers per cycle only in the two greenhouses. “Besides the better quality of our products, which are protected from external contaminants and the unstable weather conditions which may affect them, with greenhouses we harvest our products twice a year. We sell our first harvest during the Easter season and the second harvesting cycle is in August-September. Tomatoes, for example, produce fruits till December sometimes”, Ludmila told us when we visited them.
One of the benefits of this type of greenhouse, the farmers say, is that there is harvest till late autumn, because the temperature is 5-7°C higher compared to the tunnel-type greenhouse because of the big volume of air that cools more slowly and of the bigger area exposed to the sun.
They sell their products in supermarket chains in Chisinau with the help of intermediaries. However, Mihail Croitoru intends to change the approach and supply the vegetables directly to Kaufland and Metro supermarkets starting next year.
Farming has a future, the farmer says, adding that it is close to his heart and that he cannot imagine doing something else. “We have learned not to give up and move on whatever may happen. We keep investing and we want to grow. We are building two greenhouses where we intend to grow tomatoes, but we also plan to build one for greens and to apply for financing to build a cold storage facility”, Mihail says.
