Picture: Madhu Karan in his Hydroponics farm.
At a time when many lost their
jobs during the current global COVID-19 pandemic, the sentiments expressed that
agriculture will be the way forward for Fiji has never become as true as it has
for Tuirara Subdivision Hydroponic farmer, Madhu Karan.
The way he has set-up his
hydroponic farm at his home, is impressive given he has made very good use of
the tiny space around his home.
“My advice is agriculture is the
way to go. You can never go wrong with agriculture because people need food.
Job or no job people still need to eat, there’s always a market. Provided you
look for the market and become efficient. If you treat agriculture as a
business, even a small space like this, you can still make a living.”
Madhu said the income he and his
family earned was equivalent to someone who was earning $24,000-$25,000 per
annum.
“It’s good income.”
The former audio visual
businessman, like many other Fijian businesses faced uncertainty when the
current pandemic forced the closure of their business. How he and his family
were to survive?
“My initial business was events
and video production. That came to a standstill when the COVID-19 pandemic
restrictions came into place, with no gatherings allowed. There was no other
source of income and we would’ve sat idle at home. We thought about setting up
hydroponics because we knew there was a scarcity in the food supply and we know
that people will have to eat – it’s a viable business,” Madhu explained.
He explained there were three
main reasons why he started his hydroponics farm. The first, he said, was
because he was approaching retirement age and he knew he could undertake the
activities required to maintain it.
“Also I wanted my whole family to
be involved. Bringing educated kids to farm on the soil is hard. But this kind
of work, the whole family is involved. The kids check the pH, Electrical
Conductivity (EC), I do the planting, my wife does the marketing, it’s a whole
family affair,” Madhu said.
“We spent all our savings. It was
a very hard decision to make. It was risky. It was pandemic time and we did not
know when the business would start or where our next income would come from. So
we took the risk and put all our savings in hydroponics.”
Madhu said an option his family
explored before actually deciding to go all out and invest in hydroponics was
whether to start off on a small scale. But on the flip side, they decided it
would be unprofitable.
The third contributing factor to
moving ahead with hydroponics was because he had already tried it out 17 years’
ago but on a smaller scale. However, at that time he said, nutrients were not
readily available and whilst he had used chemicals and it had worked. He found
that it was economically viable, as the chemicals were expensive.
Today, Madhu and his family are
steady suppliers of lettuce and mint to supermarkets, roadside vendors, deliver
to those who order, and the drop-in customers.
“We have a steady supply. Our
productivity rate is five to six hundred plants a week. Our production is done
in such a way that we can produce a lot of plants in a very small space. At the
moment, we are planting mint and lettuce just because we don’t have enough
space. The plan to buy a farm and set up on a bigger commercial set up that is
automated; having a self-dosing system, pH checks and corrects it – things like
that, it will be more accurate and save us time,” he said.
-ENDS-