Our Tea Farm
I guess, talking about my country, Kenya, agriculture is the key pillar of our economy. I am for agriculture with all my heart and I feel sad when they give farmers bad/poor fertilizer to put on the farm.
Where I come from, we do small-scale farming, that is, we grow food just for us, mainly because of space. The kind of large scale farming we do is tea farming, which is among the cash crop of Kenya. I have worked on tea farms, from weeding, to adding fertilizer to plucking it; it's what we do at home. I won't lie, it's exhausting, but also rewarding. Sometimes I wish we had a machine to pluck tea especially in high season, like the one we're entering now.
Sometime back, I had this vision of leasing a land strictly for growing food produce, but I set it aside first. Maybe one day in the nearest future I shall revisit that vision board when I have the right capital for not only seed but also labor.
To answer the question, do you think mechanized agriculture has advantages and disadvantages?
Yes, the use of machinery has more advantages than disadvantages, as I view it. We're in a time where everything is moving digital, and it might not take long before everybody or almost everybody will feel like they're being taken advantage of by being asked to work in someone else's field for pennies. Incorporating machinery in agriculture, although it might seem like it's taking people's jobs away, will bridge the gap between saving time and maximizing profits in the farmer's portfolio.
Mechanized agriculture will ensure, when people move totally digital and GMO, that there's still hope for fresh farm products. Although it will save time and maximize profits for the farmer, the downside will be on us, the consumers, because we'll have to meet the market's price on that produce to keep the market or rather the government afloat, no matter how high it will be.
Image generated with Meta AI
But maybe, just maybe, by creating an app to connect the consumer and the farmer directly, to buy and have food products delivered before they enter the market, then the consumer can be at the advantage of not meeting the taxes imposed by the government on the products.
I'm no developer, but I'd love my app interface to enable the consumer direct access to the farmers, by collecting farmers' data and building stalls, just like drop-shipping platforms, but at a very low cost. This would give the consumer and every farmer who wants collaboration, from the small-scale farmer to the large-scale farmer, a marketplace that has zero taxes.
Because although taxes make a country grow, I think high taxes kill the economy. And by introducing such an app, people can get farm produce easily, then taxes will drop significantly, and give the country stability to even trust the government.
As to what I'd name that app, I'd give it a Kenyan name: MyShamba; Where Consumers meet Fresh Produce. MyShamba means MyFarm/MyGarden.
Thank you for reading❤️!