Today I had to break off from my daily work schedule at my tech repairs workshop so that I could attend to my maize farm. This happened to be the last day of the 4 month-long season which started with preparing the garden in the month of March till today when I finally harvested the maize we had planted.
The farm covers an area of 1 acre, not that big, the reason we managed to finish harvesting in one single day. I was joined by my brother and together we were breaking off the maize combs plant by plant, while bending them to easily identify the plants we had finished working on. We moved with 100kg sacks to drop the maize in while we moved through the farm.
Whenever the sacks got full, we would empty them by pouring the maize in one location and then continue putting more. And the process continued till we finished everything.
After the whole process, we collected the maize combs and hired a vehicle to transport them to home where we shall be drying them for a week before we start on the process of milling to get posho out of them. We do this to add value to the maize. You profit more when you sell posho instead of just plain maize, even though you incurr the cost of milling.
Farming is not as easy as it seems to be. There are lots of costs you incurr that it is hard to make profits if you choose to only pay for the services rendered at the farm. That is why we do most of the work ourselves, and only calling in people we pay when the work is beyond our capacity. For example today when we harvested with my brother, if I had decided to hire people to harvest for me, I would have incurred a cost equal to the price of a 100kg bag of maize. Losing one bag of maize is a big loss to a farmer considering that one bag could be the only profit from the farm.
This is how my day went. In a few days I'll be preparing the farm to plant more maize in the second season. The time is already up for planting, with the rains pouring almost everyday.
Thanks for reading.