In 2013, after graduated from Son La Agro-Forestry College, Thuy came back to Muong Sang, his hometown, realized the fact that several tourist attractions of Moc Chau District were located in Muong Sang, and without hesitation he wanted to do agro-tourism. For that reason, he converted a part of his family’s production land into a strawberry garden.
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1,000 m2 strawberry garden brings Thuy over 120 million dong annually. |
At the beginning, Thuy had to cop with many difficulties such as limited production area, budget shortage, zero experience in strawberry farming. Thus, to mitigate risks, he only started his business with 200 seedilings on 100 m2 land in Dong Sang Commune to do his job and gain himself some experience simultaneously.
After 4 months of farming came the very first crop. With that crop, he made 20 million dong. Seeing that it actually worked and many clients came for his products, Thuy decided to extend production area to nearly 1,000 m2 for more than 7,000 strawberry plants. In order to save production costs and improve productivity, he invested in drip irrigation system. As he managed to master new techniques and apply new technology, the income skyrocketed.
Since Thuy started growing straberries at large scale, it required him to find adequate consumption market. Therefore, Thuy was thinking of how to attract tourists to his garden for sightseeing and purchasing products at site. To make his idea realized, he set up advertising board showing the way to his garden right away. At first, there were only a few tourists coming to the site, but after some time, more and more people came.
During main crops, his households can harvest about 10 kilos of strawberries and sell at the price from 250,000 to 350,000 dong for one kilos. As the result, only with 1,000 m2 of strawberry land, Thuy can make more than 120 million dong annually in income.
As more and more tourists come to the garden, Thuy came to the decision to build a stilt house so that the tourists could have a place to stay and also explore the place. With this way of doing, Thuy’s strawberry garden has become a wonderful destination for many tourists.