City profile for Vaslui

Self-production private gardeners…

Whatever is the size of the house and socio-economic level of its owner, beyond the garden's gate starts a real private food production with tight plantation of fruit trees, rows of vegetables and lines of grapes, rain water harvesting from all the roofs available, water tanks and some forms of irrigation system to distribute it.

Familial honey production…

Consbit Srl is an example of small scale non-certified family food production: Mr Tibulca takes care of 200 hives installed in a wood in the outskirt of Vaslui producing about 6 t of honey per year. His wife is taking care of the packaging unit installed in a house nearby and his sister is taking case of the marketing. The all project has been supported by EU fund and is selling in the region and a bit beyond…

Traian food market…

The Traian market is a modern building divided in 4 sectors: fruits and vegetables; cheese and dairy; meat; fish. a special place is reserved by the municipality for the local 'producers' and avoid the stalls being all taken over by 'sellers' of less quality products coming from all the country. A food quality control laboratory is also installed in the market and seems to play an important role in the trust of the people.

Healthy snacks distribution at school…

Funds are allocated from local and county budget to distribute fresh fruits and quality food products (milk and rolls) in all schools of the municipality. Most of the pupils are eating lunch at home and there are no school canteens. Therefore this initiative aligned with the National Program of Encouraging fruit/vegetables and fresh food consumption intends to raise youth awareness with sustainable and quality food.

Household resilience…

Mr and Mrs Tinaru, a middle-high class retired couple is certainly not representative of the 3-4000 single family houses with cultivated garden. Their brand new house on a large 8000 sqm piece of land is much above the average line. But their engagement with food seems to be much more symptomatic: they are organized as a real self-production growing food in two on more than half of their plot, experimenting many varieties of grapes and tomatoes, making their wine and piling home made preserves in the summer, storing food in their 'natural fridge' specially made cave and welcoming any visitor with a complete tasting of their production.

Marius Gorcea has been presented as the most outstanding representatives of the 4,000 farmers registered in Vaslui City. Former driver, he decided a couple years ago to set up a small market gardening business. Supported by EU subsidies for young farmers, he managed to pool 5000 sqm of land from 14 different owners. With barely no prior skills in agriculture he set up a vegetable production with better efficiency compared to family gardening and traditional small farm (i.e. larger land plots, irrigation, limited variety of vegetable matching the demand…) but still keeping the fundamental assets of traditional quality food gardening.

New market gardening farmer…