Enjoy this video with Florentina Lopez Ramirez, a Seeds Program participant, as she describes growing mushrooms for a successful micro-business.
Power to Earn, Power to Choose
A fortunate outcome of the Seeds Program is the increased options and opportunities provided through creating micro-businesses.
The increase in income enables more prosperous lives in a region where economic advancement is difficult; it also allows people to stay in their home surroundings and not migrate to cities or other countries to support their families.
Creating Micro-Business Opportunities for Rural Families and Communities
Below are examples of how Program participants incorporate micro-businesses into their lives, creating the opportunity to live better with new income opportunities and greater self-reliance.
Selling Hand-crafted Cacao Beverages
From the beginning of our work in Chocolá, Doña Dominga has been a dedicated participant.
The Seed for a Future Program is a 12-month period of training and mentoring, but Doña Dominga is special – an emeritus micro-business participant.
She is an inspiration to new families in many ways, including letting Seeds use her farm as a Demonstration Center for Field Days, and sharing new plant propagation methods she developed from her own experience and knowledge.
Encouraged by our field team, she diversified her coffee grove to include cacao. She is now well-known for the hand-made tablets of cacao, sugar, and cinnamon she sells for making a tasty and popular hot chocolate beverage.
As her cacao trees mature and produce more cacao beans, Seeds for a Future extensionists helped Doña Dominga construct a low-cost, low-tech drying facility to process the growing supply of raw material.
The drying facility has allowed her to expand her micro-business while renting the drying station to other cacao growers – an additional source of revenue for our senior Star.
Oyster Mushrooms – Delicious and Nutritious
With good training, Oyster mushrooms are simple to grow and are quite prolific.
One of their advantages is that they don't take up garden space. They're grown in bags, away from sunlight and rain. Many mushroom entrepreneurs hang the bags indoors, even under a table, if space is an issue.
Many women participants have started successful micro-businesses by growing mushrooms to sell to their neighbors. There is a ready market, as mushrooms are highly favored for many popular dishes and may be expensive or unavailable in local markets.
Nutritious Produce For Sale in Chocolá Neighborhoods
New Program participants in the Chocola area expressed interest in raising enough food plants to sell them in a micro-business capacity.
Often the participants already had a ready-made client base via a small informal store as part of their house.
Seeds field team members helped these families plan the layout of their land for maximum production, using the high-producing mandala format where possible. Our micro-business coaching included improvements in the overall operation of their in-home store.
These situations are ideal for neighborhood micro-entrepreneurs. They can grow many sought-after plants and offer them without the extra time and cost of a taxi to the market.
The plants sold will always be fresher than what is in the market, as each bundle is harvested just when the customer is ready to buy.
Locally popular and nutritious plants flourish for these entrepreneurs, including mustard greens, chipilin, hierba mora, and quilete.
Increasing the Variety of Plant Foods to Sell in Local Markets
We recently conducted an Agricultural Extension Program in El Pilar, Democracia. Here families have larger plots of land than in many other areas, and participants were excited to learn about marketable crops.
Various food plants not previously grown in the area were tested for success. Cucumber, chile jalapeño, bell peppers, tomatoes, mustard greens, chard, and other desirable and nutritious plants proved well-suited.
Women from the 20 participating families formed the Community Association of El Pilar as a micro-business to raise and market the new crops and share the results.
The Association decided to use its initial harvest income to buy additional farming instruments, such as hoes, rakes, and cord, to support plants and seeds. A portion purchased fence for an area GIRASOL will use as a demonstration garden while providing food for community members. The balance was distributed among Association families.
Information and coaching in El Pilar also focused on fruit trees as an income source in addition to providing family nutrition. Several families are advancing their pig-raising activities to the micro-business level.
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