Farming — Blog — fabrar.com

We Got Rice

I had a whole other blog post planned for this weekend. But the events of the last 36 hours made me change my writing.

It’s been months since our warehouses held more than a few bags of rice for more than two or three days. As soon as we got rice, we’d mill it and ship it. Because we have supply contracts to fulfill, we need our supplies to be able to meet our obligations. Farmers sell us rice; we process and sell to clients. Since June, farmers had no rice to sell because it wasn’t harvest time. We’ve bought up all the stocks from other processors, and from the rare breed of lowland rice farmers like Cyril A, who harvest at regular intervals throughout the year. Things got so bad, we had to re-negotiate our supply contract for school feeding...we had no rice to supply.

Jeanine CooperDecember 15, 2019FabrarBusiness, Farming

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.

Jeanine CooperNovember 29, 2019Fabrar Liberia, Inc.Farming

Reaping

We’ve been in the rice business now for close to a decade. Our business model is based on buying rice from small holder farmers. Over the years, we’ve bought from thousands of rice farmers, from dozens of cooperatives and farming communities. Less than ten percent of our purchases have been from women. Invariably, when someone says “I have a rice farm”...that someone is a man.

Pretty early on, I had noticed that when it came to doing the actual work on the rice farm, it was women who were in charge...from planting to harvesting. No one said so, but I surmised that it was culturally inappropriate for the men to actually work on the rice farm, once they’d done the heavy lifting of clearing, brushing and burning the farm. Note that I have not yet seen a woman doing any of that. Especially where power tools or mechanical equipment are used, that is the domain of men.

Jeanine CooperNovember 22, 2019FarmingComment

Intercropping: a lovely nuisance

So our first round of intense harvesting is done with...we’ve harvested about 15-20% of the rice farm and got most of the rice grains out, threshed, and in the process of drying.

We had hired contract labor (women) to “scratch” the farm where “scratching” is what we call planting and raking over the seeds. The first day we ‘scratched’, I learned that they had mixed in corn seeds with the rice seeds that they ‘broadcast’...that is to say that they cast out a wide sweeping hand motions. Then I learned they’d added in sesame seeds...and tiny local cherry tomatoes...and bitter balls...and okra. It has been exciting watching all these things grow profusely.

Jeanine CooperNovember 15, 2019Farming, Intercropping, Rice Comments

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