“Cris, the land, if you take care of it, it will always give you …”. With this phrase, the web page of ‘Kiwin Organic‘, a project that was born in 2016 when Cristina Secades, a 33-year-old from Asturias, decided to quit her job in an office in Oviedo and work the land inherited from her family. Those words of her mother encouraged this forestry engineer to give life, in two farms located between the councils of Gijón Y Llanera, to the project he lives on today: ‘Kiwín Bio’. “I wanted to keep this land alive, I am passionate about nature. I started to change my eating habits and I wanted to answer the question, where does what we eat come from?”, has explained in SER Gijón.
The founder of Kiwin Organic valued several options when choosing the fruit. “I discovered this variety of kiwi and I decided on it. The plant is the same as the usual kiwi, it is hardly distinguishable, but the fruit is very different. It is the size of a grape, comes from Asia and is eaten with skin because it does not have hair. It has a lot of vitamin C and is a very complete fruit“, has related. This minikiwi requires a laborious collection, one by one, and is very sensitive to frost. They are only collected in the months of September, October and November. The most important property it has is the amount of vitamin C it has , up to five times more than the orange. In addition, it is very rich in folic acid. “I have about two hundred plants, it is a small plantation that this year will not reach 500 kilos,” said Cristina Secades.
– Cristina Secades with her kiwi plantations. / BE Gijón
Kiwín Bio products are obtained directly on the farm, direct sale, and also in small stores because the intention of this forestry engineering is “to support small businesses and reactivate the Asturian economy”. She is happy with the decision she made five years ago to start in the primary sector because “we have a very wasted Asturias. I always believed that in our region there were many possibilities, not only with a new product, but also with local products. You have to help Asturias be valued “.
The two farms in which Cristina Secades cultivated minikiwis and Asturian autochthonous apple are well connected, between Oviedo, Gijón and Avilés, an area endowed with services, but it encounters many bureaucratic obstacles. “Any small procedure is complicated and takes too long a time. In addition, the subsidies do not reach everyone. My farms are in rural areas but close to urban centers, so I cannot access LEADER funds. Now, for example, I intend to transform with the minikiwi and it is all very complicated. It is tiring “, has pointed Cristina Secades.
This 38-year-old Asturian says goodbye by inviting us to her plantation “to pass by my house, the flowering is approaching and it is a sight worth seeing”.
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