Storing Up Value

Local apple farmer Abai Shenebaev is helping renovate a Soviet-era fruit warehouse to protect winter varieties from rot and make them easily accessible for potential buyers. Photo: Jason Sangster for Mercy Corps

Tosor, Kyrgyzstan — Apples may be a fall fruit, but growers here think of them as a winter moneymaker.

Take apple farmer Abai Shenebaev, for instance. During the fall picking season, he plucks his fruit off the trees and stocks away the hardiest varieties in his basement. He keeps them there until winter, when quality apples fetch more than three times their autumn price. His neighbors who have space to store their apples do the same.

Unfortunately, the save-and-store strategy doesn't pay off for most farmers, says Robin Currey, the lead project consultant on Mercy Corps' Apple Project. In a survey of 26 households two winters ago, she discovered what she calls the "fairy tale of the winter sale."

The fairy tale is this: The growers she surveyed in November 2004 put aside 55 percent of their fall harvest, mostly in tiny home cellars with poor ventilation. When she surveyed those same 26 households the following spring, only one had completed a wintertime sale. Most of the apples either rotted or were fed to livestock.

Mercy Corps is trying to improve those results by repairing an old underground storage facility that will offer chilled space for 300 tons of apples. Renovations are being made as part of The Apple Project, a multifaceted effort to increase profits for household apple growers in two farming villages on the southern shore of Kyrgyzstan's Lake Issyk-Kul.

The Soviet-era facility — a long, one-story brick warehouse with a chilly, dirt-floor basement — had been built and used to store apples but had sat idle for nearly a decade, according to local growers. Its porous cement-and-clay walls were not properly maintained, and the building grew too cold and too moist to protect the apples from frost.

For the last week, Shenebaev and a team of neighbors have been helping build a roof that will protect the driveway that leads into the underground storage area. It's part of a renovation that includes filling in the basement walls with rocks, clay and straw; installing new metal ventilation shafts; and, on the opposite side of the building, constructing above-ground grading, weighing, sorting and storage areas for summer and autumn apples. Mercy Corps also rehabilitated the 650-meter dirt road that leads to the storage facility from the main highway.

"I think this will be better than what I have, and it has a lot of capacity," says Shenebaev, whose job this afternoon is to slap hot tar on the eave timbers to make them rot resistant. "Most people don't have cold storage, and they end up selling their winter varieties for a really cheap price."

Besides the wintertime protection, the facility offers growers the advantage of having one centralized point from which to sell their harvest. That should make them more attractive to wholesale buyers, says Shenebaev, who want to fill their trucks quickly.

Indeed, time is money. And market timing, these growers know, can mean the difference between profit and loss. They are hoping this renovated storehouse can keep the region's apples firm and ripe until the dead of winter, and that the fairy tale of the winter sale has a real-life happy ending.