But here in remote Bamian, the terrain itself poses a huge challenge to bringing crops to market.

To get to Shibar, one must drive from the provincial capital of Bamian for about an hour, up a narrow dirt track carved along the mountains. The car slowly winds its way so high along the mountaintop that the clouds hang nearly at arm’s length. Then, even more slowly, as the path descends in spiraling bends, the car splashes through sudden creeks of snow melt that run through narrow gorges.

After the Taliban destroyed giant Buddha statues in 2001, Bamian Province became associated mainly with one thing: potatoes. Lots of potatoes. In 2015, Bamian produced nearly 350,000 tons of potatoes, about 60 percent of Afghanistan’s total consumption, according to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

But an overabundance of that single product became a headache for farmers in Shibar, leaving them vulnerable to trader exploitation and struggling to meet their own basic food needs for most of the year.

During harvest season, the potatoes are sold wholesale at dirt-cheap prices: roughly $150 a ton. The farmers have no way of holding on to the potatoes for the winter months, when wholesale prices double. The approximately 500 cold storage facilities built in Bamian with the help of the Afghan government in recent years are simply not enough. (The smaller facilities hold about 15 tons, and the larger community ones about 60 tons.)

That realization forced the Afghan government and its international partners a few years ago to encourage growing new crops, and women like Ms. Husseini took the lead in Shibar.