Far East: How families develop free hectares

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Spend a weekend in a house with bees or go snowmobiling along a mountain pass in the taiga? Read what the participants of the "Far Eastern Hectare" program have done on their lands.

In Russia, since 2016, you can take for yourself several hectares of land in the Far East for FREE. The Far Eastern Hectare program was designed to enable people to develop hard-to-reach places on the very edge of Russia, while using these lands for both personal and commercial purposes. We talked with the owners of the most unusual "hectares".

Bee camping

Spending a weekend at an apiary and even spending the night in a house with bees - such an unusual form of recreation appeared in Primorye thanks to Alexander Yurkin. In the village of Tigrovoe, his family first had a dacha, and in 2016 he took 10 hectares of land, where they built a farm.

“So far, we are taking on vacation friends and their friends who find out about us through word of mouth,” says Alexander. Guests live both in the owner's house and in tents, and in addition, they can spend the night in the "Apitoria", a house with bees.

“On the first floor there is a large cedar lounger where 4 bee colonies live, and on the second floor there is a guest room with a panoramic view of the apiary,” says the beekeeper. - People who want to lie on a lounger with bees, get stronger and gain strength, listen to their buzzing, be with them on the same energy wave, be present in their biofield, smell the resin of Manchurian cedar and honey can stay here. You can spend the night or just come for a couple of hours."

Alexander knows everything about bees: since childhood, his father took him to the taiga to the apiary, and he still keeps half a century of beehives inherited from his wife's grandfather. When he had his own family, he began to think about food and the relationship with the environment.

On the farm, he and his wife and three children and mother constantly live from April to November, and for the winter he leaves for Vladivostok - the children go "to society", as he says, and he himself is engaged in the repair of hives, construction, and also sells honey through Instagram. a couple of days a week leaving for the city to visit the family.

Despite the fact that the city is only 160 km away, it is difficult to get to because of the mountainous terrain, especially after typhoons, which are not so rare. In Soviet times, there was a base for skiers and a tourist train "Snezhinka" went here, and more than a thousand people lived in the village itself. Now only five houses are inhabited on the farm, including the house of Alexander.

“There were lands around us without documents, and when the Far Eastern Hectare program appeared, we decided to formalize them. We took a place along the river where there were residential buildings a hundred years ago. We are planning to clear all the thickets there and place holiday homes”.

Alexander says that this program allowed people who were afraid of bureaucratic red tape with the registration of land ownership to do everything simply and for free. "I don't see a massive influx of people from other regions here, although there are serious entrepreneurs who take 50 hectares each and try to develop tourism and agriculture."

Difficulties in the development of hectares are not only due to roads, but also to electricity. Taiga inhabitants - tigers, red deer, wild boars, bears - also come to visit.

“That year the bear went for 33 nights for the hives, I didn’t want to shoot him, anyway they come back every year. In the end, I decided to put him a glass jar of honey. He licked it, didn't even break it, turned out to be very cultured and never came back."

However, Alexander hopes that all these are temporary difficulties, and city dwellers will again come to Tigrovoe to feel the unity with nature.

“I want space,” he says. - I want our people to feel free, even without electricity and the Internet. And so that the bees buzz."

Fabulous mountain manor

Spouses Viktor Atamanyuk and Evgenia Yurieva with their three children moved to the remote taiga from Khabarovsk back in 2003. They fled the city of their own accord: I wanted to be alone with nature, to escape from office everyday life and try "business from scratch."

Here, on the Miao-Chan mountain range, 8 km from the nearest village along almost impassable roads, they have equipped a real recreation center without the Internet, with amenities on the street. But there are four guest houses with stoves, a real Russian sauna on wood and eight northern sled dogs, Alaskan malamutes and Siberian huskies to ride a sleigh through the snow-covered taiga. Far Eastern Alaska - this is how Evgenia calls her possessions.

“At first, for 13 years, we simply rented these lands, and when the Far Eastern Hectare appeared, we formalized them according to the program,” says Evgenia.

During the season, about a thousand people come to them, and there are already few places for everyone. Family excursions, fun bachelorette parties, and business seminars are held here.

“We would like to build a guest house that could receive more guests at the same time and would be easier to maintain than those that are heated by stoves,” says the hostess. “We wanted to take out a loan for this project, but the banks refused us, considering our incomes insufficient.”

So far, all the profit goes to the maintenance of the economy, and this is very capacious in the northern conditions of the wild taiga without infrastructure. “We made a well at our own expense, we have an autonomous gasoline generator, and we drive along an overgrown road left over from Soviet geologists. In winter, it is possible to reach us from the village only by snowmobiles, skis … or on foot,”says Evgenia.

Until 2020, “Far Eastern hectares, which are implementing agricultural projects, were financed, but next year they promise to help the tourism industry, and Evgenia hopes that soon the beauty of Miao-Chan will be able to see more guests.

Shiitake mushrooms and Vietnamese pigs

Until recently, Andrei Popov lived in Vladivostok and was engaged in video advertising, and then left the city and went to the taiga, to the village of Timofeevka, 45 km from the city, to make his old dream come true. “I always wanted my house, a garden, but there was no opportunity. And when the Far Eastern Hectare program appeared, I decided that it was time to act,”says Andrey. “I took 9 hectares and organized a small farm here.”

At first everything was like everyone else: chickens, goats, quails. “Agriculture will not work here, the whole earth is in huge boulders,” he says. - I wanted to plant a couple of hectares of potatoes and even bought a tractor. But when the snow melted, I saw a field in the stones and cried."

Then Andrey decided to get himself black Vietnamese pigs. Then he mastered the cultivation of Japanese forest shiitake mushrooms, which are appreciated not only in the kitchen, but also in medicine. “If the shiitake go well, I'll make more room for them,” says the farmer.

We were lucky with the infrastructure: there is cellular communication, roads, and even electricity. Learned the intricacies of online farming and communicating with more experienced farmers. His son, who comes from the city on vacation, helps him build a house and take care of the property.

But he does not forget his experience in advertising either - Andrey maintains a popular blog on YouTube and Instagram, where he talks about his transformation from an office worker into an ax and shovel worker, and also shares tips on how to correctly draw up documents and open his own farm.

“It is important to correctly choose and register the land on which one can engage in agriculture, especially if the person was not previously associated with this,” he says.