Profitable Dragon Fruit and Exotic Mushrooms

Dear Reader,

I came to Mumbai in 2005 with just a suitcase, a handbag, and the determination to give my best to whatever I took up. My family, especially my father, assumed I would return after a few years. I never did.

Mumbai isn’t just home; it holds a piece of my heart. It is also where I transitioned from being a journalist to an entrepreneur. That’s the magic of the Maximum City - if you carry even a spark of enterprise, Mumbai turns it into a flame. 

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A similar spark was ignited in Richa Sharma, an MBA, who quit her job and moved to Mumbai after her husband’s transfer in 2016. Passionate about cooking, she regularly experimented with her mother’s recipes. Gradually, the word spread in her colony that she was preparing healthy food items for her children, my colleague Rama writes.

Soon, people in her society started approaching her with requests for homemade sweets and snacks. Today, her home business Humble Flavours sells handcrafted and gluten-free laddus, vegan snacks, pickles and other products in 15 countries. Of her earnings, she donates 15 percent every month to NGO Goonj.

My colleague Malay spoke to Santosh Kumar Behera, whose rice trading business collapsed after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding himself at a crossroads, he experimented with dragon fruit cultivation on an acre after taking training in Sangareddy, Telangana.

That was in 2020. Today, he clocks a turnover of Rs 9 lakh per acre, of which Rs 8 lakh is profit because organic farming keeps his costs low. He has expanded to three acres and has started strawberry farming, also. His case shows that if farming is backed by training, patience and best practices, profits are certain.

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Last week, I spoke to Himanshu Saini, a young farmer from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Tired of financial ups and downs while working as a stenographer, he researched a low-investment home business and zeroed in on mushroom farming.

Like Santosh, Himanshu also took training at DMR-Solan and KVK Saharanpur before investing Rs 4,000 in starting oyster mushroom farming over 70 sq ft in his house. They fetched revenue of Rs 22,000, and Himanshu never looked back.

He now earns Rs 20,000 daily from oyster, button and exotic mushroom varieties. He wakes up at 5am, harvests the day’s mushrooms and sells them to wholesalers in Dehradun, Delhi and Saharanpur. He continues attending training courses at KVK to improve his skills.

My colleague Riya wrote our weekend feature on five easy steps to grow a fresh salad on your balcony. A small balcony or terrace garden allows you to grow salad organically with just compost and natural pest-control methods. A few packets of seeds and basic containers can yield fresh harvests for weeks. How? Riya has detailed in her piece.

Happy Reading!

Warmly,

Rashmi

This MBA quit the corporate track to take Indian handmade snacks global

Rice trader turns dragon fruit farmer, earns Rs 9 lakh per acre

How this mushroom farmer earns Rs 20,000 daily from just 2,000 sq ft

5 easy steps to grow fresh salad on your balcony