Their primary cash crop, tomatoes, had suffered disease problems. As many as 1500 plants in a field, expected to yield 1 kilo of tomatoes each, had shriveled and died in a few days. Market gardeners are plentiful in this region, where every villager, no matter what their profession, has an acre or two on which they grow vegetables for their family consumption and then sell the surplus. In addition to raising a market garden, it is common to raise five to ten hogs and a flock or two of chickens. Some households have a few cows or goats or geese.
Women shoulder much of the farm and housework in the villages, and they age rapidly as a result.
Using Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Grower , and with the help of a very able young translator, I shared with farmers some basic techniques such as crop rotation, cover cropping, soil building, and extended season production. Farmwork is done with hand tools, including all tillage. Although rototillers are manufactured in the Ukraine, they are poorly constructed and considered very dangerous. Since their independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, these farmers no longer have access to chemical fertilizers. They obviously compost on-farm but do so out of necessity, rather than because they intend to use the humus for soil building.