Farming came into my life when it was the only alternative practice or let's say career one could do along side our primary assignment as caretakers of the church. Being fully employed with monthly stipends, we are to put serve the commission who employs us faithful as ministers. But the commitment from the church do not take all our time completely. We usually have some spare time for ourselves. In our organization, we do have some of the time for ourselves. So, there is this grace granted to us that we could use that left over time to engage in something productive. But we have been warned not to allow whatever we are putting ourselves into to affect our primary assignment negatively.
So, having gotten that my hands, I choose to go into farming. Moreover, many of our colleagues equally try that and they do not have any issues with the authorities. Even, the authorities have suggested that pastors should farm so that they can support their families.
I've been on this for about 4 years now. Sometimes, I will bring home a lot of harvest. Another time I will have very low output due to the effects of external factors like insufficient rain or poor management. I remember a year I had a lot of beans. I harvested many bags of beans and we were blessed with income and food from that. I could also remember when potatoes and cassava was always sufficient for my family consumption in so much that we didn't have to buy cassava products for more than two years. If you will ask me, I will tell you that there have also been such times when our output was not anything to right home about.
Those times that I suffer losses or poor yield, it was because of one Inexperience practice or the other. There was a year or two when I used herbicides to control the weeds in the farm. The herbicides had a wrong toll on me. They inhibited the growth of my crops. Those who the bad days. Well, we do not always take the blame as if we intensionally allow the bad to happen (those people will always blame us when something goes wrong). I have another ugly incidence this year just because I didn't know that taking that decision will cause me that lose.
I was blessed with a sizeable yield of cassava. In fact, ever since I started farming, this is the season when I have such a huge cassava yield. So, I decided to process the cassava to garri using paid labour. Now, the result of that action has actually made it to look like I throw away the cassava and bought the garri that came out with the money I have spent. It would have been better and profitable if I had sold the cassava and then bought garri with it. Now, I had to spend additional money and the cassava just to get an output that just equivalent to buying it with the same amount I have spent.
Inexperience! I didn't know that the cost of paid labour is so high that it will virtually look like you are actually buying what you are processing with the money. Now, this is a serious problem to farmers. It is not as if their ground does not give them reasonable yield; it is because the cost of labour and transportation is so high such that at the end of it all, it still looks like farming is not profitable.