STUMPED!

When you think about farming, the images that come to mind are of someone, usually an older someone, chugging along on a shiny tractor, with neat rows of some crop or other looking almost ready-to-eat. If you think about farming in Liberia, or in Africa, your image is of gnarled hands holding some home-made-looking tool; or women bending double to put something in the ground.

I googled the word ‘farming’ and looked at the images. Yup. Neat rows with some machine nearby; or African woman bending over some rudimentary hoe. And if you search a bit longer, you will see the age on the typical farmer. Whatever this farming business, in our Liberian context, it looks anything but fun.

The need for mechanization is glaring. And of course, even the less erudite among us, will stress that. We need machines; tractors...then voices usually trail off, not quite sure what machines we need, or what they are called. Or what they do. Or if we have them.

I was like that. I listened to Madame Nkozasana Dlamini Zuma, then Chairperson of the African Union, when she told us that “African farmers need to get rid of the hand-held hoe!” Yeah, mehn! We need machines. We need equipment. And tractors always head the list. We need tractors to replace the hand-held-hoe, to plow our land.

When we decided to grow our own rice, tractors were my first priority. I wanted plenty of them. The answer to our farming prayers. As it happened, we were lucky to get a grant for farm equipment; we were unlucky because we wrote the grant before we’d tried our hands at large scale farming.

One of the first big purchases was a power tiller. Before buying that one, I was busy on YouTube and Google, watching people use tractors and power tillers. I was very excited, and all my “experts” were excited with me. Including the grant administrators.

So off we go to the farm with the power tiller. As it happened, by then we’d already cleared and planted the rice farm so we couldn’t use the machine there. But we had a vegetable “garden”, if you can call a 7-acre plot a garden, and we could train folks to use the power tiller. But then... we got stumped.

Because everywhere on the area we were going to plow, we had stumps. “If you put the machine on that land, the stumps will bust the tyres!” Oh. Of course. So gidigidigidi, we start clearing stumps. The small ones were relatively easy, if you can call 10-20 minutes of hacking away at each stump with cutlasses “easy”. After two days of “de-stumping” and we had half an acre de-stumped of all but the larger girth trees. “By next year, those ones will be dead!”

Ah! Next year! (!?!)

“But maybe we can move between these stumps...,” I whined. The operator was shaking his head. “No Old Ma! De stump dem ondohgrahn. Dey will boss de tayah dem!” Naw! Really? REALLY? Yes oh! The stumps have underground roots that will puncture the tyres. Aye mehn!

So we bought a power saw, and hired people to come back and saw at those stumps. After all, charcoal production is the biggest industry on that road and it starts with a power saw. And we have a whole cadre of young men who know well how to operate that saw. Two weeks, two hundred dollars later, and two replacements of the belt on the power saw, and we’d cleared 7 acres.

I began to see the enormity of the problem for mechanizing. The power tiller is the smallest of the mechanized farming tools I have en route. Tractor oh; harrow oh; disc plough oh; rice transplanter; combine harvester...not a one of them can be deployed on land that had not been de-stumped.

Not. A. One.

I felt betrayed by my expectations. And that nobody “told me” about this huge challenge. A bit of research and I found out that farmers in Nigeria had listed land clearing as the single biggest drawback to expanding cultivation. Not the yield on their seeds. Not the lack of chemicals and fertilizers. Not the lack of market. Clearing that land. Unfortunately, the project whose report I was reading this, focused on distributing high-yielding seeds. they ain’t no different from us. We too have all kinds of seed distribution ad none of the plenty plenty grants and donor money are even thinking about helping farmers to clear land. Too expensive.

So, empowered by my new enlightenment, I set out to get land clearing machines to come and clear a hundred acres or so. The cost was high but not unacceptably so. However...and I should have seen this one coming too...however, the machine has to be brought to the farm on a low bed trailer. And THAT cost was as much as the rental for the machine. To haul one bulldozer 30 miles and back costs more than a round trip business class ticket from Monrovia to New York.

Sucking my teeth!

But as with everything, we learn to spin and jab. The land we’ve already cleared for vegetables...the veggies look so good, but they’re not very viable commercially. Anyway, that  land is good enough for a five acre rice farm. With irrigation (and that one I’m on top of! Ish.), we can get 3.5 harvests in one year. And we can use our machines in there like my friend Old MacDonaldEmeryCooper. We can dispense with the weeds and operate a mini combine harvester. Three and a half times in one year.

We will do it smaw smaw.