GAF
The most opportune farm
Its entrance, made of green painted wood, anticipates an interesting place. And so it is! After traveling a dirt road lined by bean plantations and prepared furrows, you arrive at a farm whose order reveals a work thought and made with the heart.
Located between Artemisa and Candelaria is this site, which emerged from the sweat of men and women; they challenged a landscape swallowed by brush, which cried out for those who love work. On a date as special for Cubans as August 13, workers from the Artemisa Agricultural Supplies Company (Gelma) and its Base Business Unit (UEB) of Assurance and Services, began to transform the place into what is now Finca de Organic Fertilizer - Livestock Module of the aforementioned Company. Protagonists to the ring Adolaimis Valdés Páez, the economist, says that the idea was to create an area to guarantee self-sufficiency for the Company and the community. Once the land was cleared, the areas for animal husbandry had been created and the first lands were plowed, they thought they could do more. According to José Antonio Domínguez, Tony, as the head of the farm is called, the area is known as La Chivera. There was a hamlet there and it was very abandoned. “When it was decided to erect the farm, we found weeds, debris and marabou. They were days of a lot of work: we were only eight people; you are now in a very different, productive, welcoming place. “After clearing, we built the barn for rabbits, and the office. Then we made a pond for the breeding of fish and Creole ducks, areas for dark-coated pigs and free-range chickens that we closed with wooden fences. "The farm is completed by several hectares dedicated to the planting of vegetables, grains, viands and condiments, plantations of guava, mangoes, acerola, coconut trees, lemon, avocado ... and we are preparing others to grow rice and taro". Yaimary Corrales González is the cook. She, along with her husband Yasiel Corso Rodríguez, is part of the founders squad of the site, and she feels very good despite cooking with firewood, since her companions make up a very close family. Marilín Jiménez Rosabal and Magalis Díaz Licor joined in December. Both are agricultural workers, and they consider the opening of the farm an opportunity to work and earn a living with their efforts. Timely creation with a future This farm was completed in the midst of great difficulties, the scourge of COVID-19 and the implementation of the Ordering Task. According to Tony, they have already harvested lettuce, which was destined for the workers, the community and the Company's dining room, thereby fulfilling their mission of producing for self-sufficiency. In addition to providing food to the Company, which is extremely important to lower the cost of lunches and generate profits, the farm created about twenty jobs for Artemiseños who live nearby, and that number has yet to grow, added Adolaimis Valdés. "Here we also produce tobacco, which we use in crops to control insects and viruses that attack plantations." He specified that the assembly of a warehouse to produce earthworm humus and then commercialize it, two houses of covered cultivation, a carpentry and a plant for the production of Ecomic (biofertilizer that favors the productivity of the plants) were approved. Parallel to the sowing, the attention to plants and animals, the socio-administrative is expanded, they build a dining room, kitchen, bathrooms and a room to host a visit or cover an emergency. Artemisa has very beautiful estates, but Gelma's is transcendent because of its scope and because it shows that, as José Martí wrote, the only autograph worthy of a man is the one he leaves written with his works.
