I am a shoat farmer. Sheep and goats are collectively farmed as shoats. Following the drought of a few years ago, I learnt the hard way that to be a successful shoat farmer you need to be food secure for at least a year. What this means is that you should have food storage for your animals to keep you covered for the periods where they cannot get enough food from grazing out in the fields. So I bought a 1.5 acre field of ready-to-harvest-maize last year and chewed  character development for a week of Sundays thereafter as I learnt the hard way about what it would take to convert that maize into a long term food bank.

Last September, I wrote the following about that harvesting experience:

“Casual laborers were hired and they took an entire day to harvest cut the maize stalks. The full day rate for local casual labor culture requires the employer to provide tea and a scone at 10 a.m. and a meal at lunchtime. If you don’t provide the meal, well, you’ll struggle to get another crew the next day. Contrary to the popular view that labor supply outstrips demand, in my little village in Laikipia you have to give a 48 hour notice to find a crew as there are quite a number of my fellow Nairobi residents doing large scale farming around the area.

Then it got interesting. The harvested maize needed to be transported to my farm and I would have to hire a lorry. The only one available was a decrepit, dilapidated truck that was literally held together by screws of hope and strings of prayer. David, the truck owner, was a cantankerous, foul mouthed diabetic who had no time for the laborers’ requirements for tea and lunch breaks. Due to the condition of the truck, David would drive painstakingly slow, ambling along the 5 kilometre distance with a repurposed dry maize cob as the gear stick holder. He complained every single minute for the two days it took to load the field of maize, transport it and unload it at the farm. On the second day, he pulled my sunburnt hand to the shade of a tree and told me that I was motivating my laborers the wrong way.

According to him, since the laborers were being paid a daily wage, they would take their time to load up the truck. Next time, he growled, I should pay them per truck that was loaded and I would see a change in their efficiency. Once the maize was offloaded, it had to be chopped by a thresher and poured into a pit to prepare it as silage. The thresher was powered by the engine of a tractor and the maize was manually fed into it by two laborers. Three others stood at the thresher exit to distribute and compact the chopped product in the pit . This took another three days. The thresher operator pulled my other sunburnt arm under the shade of a tree and told me that the laborers were moving too slowly for his liking. In future, I should  thresh the maize as it was being harvested and pour the chopped product straight into a tipper truck. The truck would then come and tip the product straight into the silage pit. This would cut both labor and transport costs significantly. Thresher operator was basically validating what cantankerous David had said.”

Because my patience and my telephone farming pockets had been worn thin, this year I decided to listen to the advice given. After planting my own acre of maize, we found a one size fits all resource. This friendly gentleman  – let’s call him Gabriel – comes with his own laborers who cut the maize, feed the stalks through a thresher that has an overhead chute straight into the back of a tipper lorry that then transports the cut silage straight to the storage site where it is compressed using Gabriel’s tractors. Do you see how the entire process fits into one sentence? It cost me 39% of what last year’s experience cost and was executed in one day. I want to tell Cantankerous David and Thresher Operator that they were one hundred percent correct, I appreciate their generous advice and won’t be needing their labor intensive services again.

Meanwhile Gabriel has to be booked way in advance, as his order book is populated by other Laikipia farmers who saw the commercial light a long time ago. Are you a telephone farmer fed up with local labor shenanigans? Do your research assidously, the solutions are right there on the ground.

X:@carolmusyoka

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