Learning to Grow

Murat Toguzbaev got a bigger apple yield after an agronomist hired by Kompanion, the microlender spawned by Mercy Corps, offered advice on how to tend his trees. Photo: Jason Sangster for Mercy Corps

Tamga, Kyrgyzstan — It's a crisp, late-September morning that feels perfect for plucking apples, and a tree in Murat Toguzbaev's backyard is sagging with dozens of plump Red Delicious varietals just ripe for the picking.

"This tree use to look like a large bush, and it had really small apples," says Murat, a 37-year-old husband and father of two. He's a handyman more comfortable around machines than crops, and he admits that he neglected his parents' household garden after they died six years ago and bequeathed him the property.

But this spring, Murat took advantage of free farming advice offered by two agronomists dispatched by Kompanion, the countrywide microfinance institution established and governed by Mercy Corps. Through on-site consultations and more than a dozen farming seminars, Murat learned the best place to plant rows of carrots, radishes, beets and other vegetables, and how to maximize yields from his apple and apricot trees. He also learned how to care for the 25 apple-tree seedlings he bought with proceeds from a four-month, $75 loan from Kompanion.

Helping farm families grow higher-quality apples is one component of an ambitious Mercy Corps program to raise the standard of living here and in the neighboring town of Tosor. Together, these two towns on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul are home to about 1,000 households, most of whom grow apples in backyard gardens as small as 8,000 square feet. "The Apple Project" is an effort to help these farmers grow and store premium apples, find interested buyers and earn more money on each sale.

"The Apple Project is the perfect marriage of development and finance," says Catherine Brown, Mercy Corps' Kyrgyzstan country director. She expects Kompanion to tackle similar projects as it expands from a strictly loan-making enterprise into a new kind of commercial bank. The plan is to offer a wide array of financial services, like savings accounts and educational loans, and to complement those services with a new community-development organization.

A Legacy of Apples

All of the apples sold in the world today trace their lineage back to varieties grown in the foothills of the snow-covered Tien Shan Mountain Range, which divides modern-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The first named apple variety showed up in France in the early 17th century, presumably via Asia's Silk Road, and European immigrants later took the seeds to American shores. (Their status as an American icon stems from the westward migration in the 1800s, when homesteaders in some states were required to plant a certain number of apple trees to back up their claim to the land.)

Yet despite the region's long association with the apple, many local growers lack the expertise required to make the most from their orchards. In Soviet times, explains Kompanion agronomist Omurbek Chynybaev, villagers worked mainly for collective farms and agricultural universities were starved for funding. "It takes time to turn people's attention toward their own properties. When people started working for themselves, they realized they needed help."

Murat clearly needed some assistance. He called Chynybaev to visit his property, and began attending the project's monthly seminars in subjects such as where to plant, how to prune, and how to handle and store apples. Along with the seminars, the first 200 project registrants were given the chance to apply for a loan of about 3,000 soms, or US$75, to purchase apple seedlings from a nearby nursery.

"When this project started, I didn't know anything about apples," Murat says near a pile of just-harvested fruits. "And this garden didn't look like a garden at all."

Budding Green Thumb

Today, what was once an unruly backyard filled with weeds, bricks and scraps of metal more resembles a productive garden. Cabbages, some with heads bigger than a human's, grow in three neat rows. There are also tall stalks of carrots and dillweed, rows of beets and radish, and apricot trees — trees whose summer fruits he sold to pay off his loan on time.

And that Red Delicious tree that once resembled a bush now actually "looks like a tree," he says proudly. He plans to wait until the first frost before harvesting the still-ripening apples for his family; other varieties are already stowed away to sell when prices rise over the winter.

Murat has yet to plant all of his yard; there's a square patch that until now he's kept as grass to feed his small herd of cattle and sheep. But now he looks at that uncultivated swath with the eyes of a maturing farmer. Might apple trees someday sprout there? "I do have," Murat offers, "some more room to plant."