The rain and windy weather continues unabated this week. Thunder the likes unheard since leaving Africa. So far, in the past six days, we have had a hundred and fifty millimetres of rain, and more rain is forecast for at least another three days. On our drive to Ansiao to our accountants early this week, the vineyards and olive plantations in the lower areas were flooded, and the streams in many places had burst their banks.
In the week where I read that the Chinese have made a quantum leap in AI with the release of Deepseek, which instigated Nvidia, the United States chip maker, to shed nearly $600billion of its share value, our trip to Ansiou was initiated with the arrival by post of our Proof of Life Form from the British Department of Work and Pension (DWP). In these times, usually, anything related to returns, payment of bills, especially utilities, including licence renewals, is done electronically, not so the DWP. It still sends out hard copy forms to be completed in ink, witnessed and returned by post. Something that should require two minutes on the computer entailed a forty-kilometre round trip to Ansiao for the completed form to be witnessed by our accountant, followed by a trip to the local Post Office to register it for posting. The registered post was our decision: if the pension office does not receive the form within a set time, they will stop payment. Getting reinstated would undoubtedly be a bureaucratic nightmare, with countless forms and affidavits. Better be safe than sorry and have proof of delivery.
“By admission, I do not know how to use Chatbot, let alone Deepseek. The poor grammar and spelling is corrected by my daughter Janine manually. I cannot even get Google Dictate to work for me due to my accent. Being Scottish, I end up like the two Scotsmen stuck in the voice-activated lift.” - Peter McSporran
Why do I get a British pension? Having been employed in that country for about a year before leaving for Rhodesia, I had paid tax and social security. Therefore, I was registered in that country, and any income paid in the UK was taxed there. Being in Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe, I could not continue to pay my social security due to currency restrictions, nor did I think I would ever need a British pension. With hindsight, this had been poor judgement, and only later in Zambia did I try to back pay it. Due to my age DWP only allowed me to do so for ten years; therefore, my pension from the UK is only 33%, or the princely sum of £3,400 per annum. Not much, but it is still greatly appreciated. Despite still paying taxes beyond my pensionable age in the UK and now Portugal, it makes no difference to my pension. What has made a difference is that my national insurance regarding health is treated as fully paid up, which has helped me register with the health service here in Portugal, where I now qualify for free health care. My recent medical procedures’ costs over the past few years would have far exceeded any savings I had. In saying that, many, including Americans, seem to get into the system here fairly easily. Like in the UK, I am told, medical staff say they are paid to treat people, not police those for eligibility.
At one time, when things were good in the old country, Rhodesia and to a certain extent in early Zimbabwe, I thought my pension was worth at least a million, and I would retire happily with no financial worries in my old age. I am sure, like all Zimbabweans with local pensions and even life insurance policies, it was all we could get due to currency restrictions. With devaluation, my retirement pension became worth only a few beer crates. I have talked about this before, and it still irritates me. The icing on our cake of misery was the confiscation of our farms and, therefore, even our homes. I do not know how the hell Old Mutual and the like got away with it. Changing from local currency to hard currency when the ZW$ was at its lowest, billions, even trillions to one. Oh, I am off the subject, I was only meant to have a bleat about having to get a physical form signed and returned to the UK pension office, while the rest of the world does it electronically. How archaic are they? I suppose it guarantees numerous civil servants jobs, whose salaries are paid from our tax, taking precedence over our pensions or, for that matter, if in Britain, your heating allowance.
This week, I wanted to talk more about my farming enterprises in Zimbabwe. Little did I know that on leaving the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) where I had just spent most of the previous four years. Unbeknownst to me, I would have less than five years left on our farms. Yes, I was concerned about the Government taking the farms, but as mine, like many others, was highly productive, I thought we would be safe. Why would a state destroy its economy?
“In the fight for political survival, dictators think nothing of the lives of their subjects, let alone their welfare.” - Peter McSporran
When I left the CFU, we owned three farms: Diandra Estate, the home farm and the most productive; Mede Farm, slightly bigger but with mainly rainfed crop production; and finally Rydal, the smallest at just under seven hundred hectares, a red soil farm at the head of the Mazowe Valley. Diandra and Mede were both tobacco farms in Darwendale, although on Diandra, groundnuts (peanuts) were an essential crop, while Rydal in Mazowe was seed crops with maize seed as the mainstay. When the opportunity arose, we would lease other farms from time to time, most notably in the 1980s, when Henry and Tinks Bezuidenhout wisely left the country to grow tobacco in Swaziland to earn some foreign currency. This was also a fully integrated tobacco section. Henry had long returned before the 90s and continued to grow tobacco as his main crop, but with his son Mark joining him, he and Tinks had built a beautiful home overlooking the dam. Of interest, Mark established an export rose enterprise, while Henry diversified into poultry. I make special mention as Henry died tragically in January 1998 in a road accident. He was a great friend and fishing partner.
Wherever grazing was available for cattle, we showed an interest in renting various properties from time to time. I also leased some arable land on Rainton farm, next to Mede, which belonged to Corn Smit, to grow tobacco. I should perhaps also mention that in the lead-up to the farm invasions, Alistair Smith and I leased with an option to buy Wellesley Estate from Hamish and Nancy Black. The farm invasions put paid to any purchase, sadly, for both them and us. This was a tobacco and cattle unit, mainly grazing land.
The easiest way for me to talk about our farming enterprises is to go through each commodity and its place in my farming activities. Once again, like my time at the CFU, my experience in diverse farming enterprises helped me when I got involved in consulting and financing agriculture throughout many parts of Africa.
When we agreed to lease Diandra way back in 1977, my father-in-law Derek Belinsky was growing maize and running cattle there. This production was not lucrative and barely covered the salary of the then-manager Andy Hartell, who went on to become a successful manager at Mazowe Citrus Estate. Before the Government took over the farm for the building of the Darwendale Dam, now Lake Hunyani, the farm was known as Gwebi Junction as it was at the confluence of the Gwebi, Hunyani and Umzururu Rivers. It was then sold back to my father-in-law, having lost a third of its area under the new title Diandra. The previous owner was a gentleman of Irish descent called Moore, and the locals still call the farm Moore to this day. Mr Moore tried growing tobacco, but his Virginia tobacco was deemed off-type due to, it was said the shallow, wet, cold soils. For a while, he reverted to fire-cured, of which four fire-cured tobacco barns remained.
My plan was to double-crop tobacco and early plant to avoid most of the cooler months. Once the dam was full I introduced groundnuts into the rotation, which proved also to improve quality. I had grown groundnuts for Les and Liford Edwards in Enterprise and had found it a worthwhile crop in any rotation being a legume. It turned out a success and worked out well, with my tobacco-growing neighbours all adopting this program, they being John Gordon and Clem Bruk-Jackson. We had to build the curing from scratch and went for forced air, as I have previously recorded. Yields were also improved as less loss was incurred during curing compared to conventional barns which relied on convection to distribute the heat from hand-stoked furnaces—a tedious job requiring supervision 24/7. It also used about twenty-five per cent coal or wood fuel compared to conventional barns, yet another substantial saving. With the use of irrigation, the introduction of forced air curing systems, and improved varieties, the country's average tobacco yields had risen from eighteen hundred kilograms to two thousand five hundred per hectare, with irrigated yields well in excess of three thousand kilograms.
Tobacco became the backbone of my farming enterprise, and without it, I would not have been able to purchase the farms so quickly. When you are a young farmer without land, you need to identify a core enterprise that will not only show a good profit but will be able to carry your overheads and leave a surplus for capital repayments. I recall that, at the time I left Scotland, the popular enterprise for this was dairying, which, back then, was deemed hard work but lucrative. I have no clue how you would do it nowadays.
Like dairy, tobacco was a 24/7 job requiring skilled management, which, when done correctly, gave substantial rewards. Unlike dairy, though, the curing season was only for five months, although with irrigation the growing and harvesting season was eight months, the grading season being four months.
By 1996, Health and Safety had become much more important. By then, most of the dangerous chemicals were banned, such as DDT or being fazed out, as was Methyl Bromide (EDB), the soil fumigant. Varieties have also improved, with more and more eelworm (nematodes) and disease resistant varieties being available.
“I do not know of one neighbour when I visited him at ridging and fertilising when the EDB was injected into the soil who would not dig into the ridge with his bare hands and sniff the soil to ensure the EDB was being applied. So much for health and safety in the early days.” - Peter McSporran
At our peak, when we leased Henry’s farm, we went up to two hundred hectares of tobacco but by 1996, we were growing about one hundred and forty hectares, also introducing double cropping on Mede irrigation not just only guaranteed a crop it also halved the cost of the curing infrastructure, the main capital cost in establishing a tobacco production unit, and the field equipment in the form of tractors, ploughs and ridgers etc. Also, it meant that your labour was fully employed throughout the year. In the old days of rainfed tobacco, there was little to do on the farms from September to December other than cording wood for curing. The other benefit of growing tobacco was that it attracted good, ambitious managers. Tobacco is a high-management crop, which is also partly processed on the farm, being cured and graded before sale. It was obvious to all if you wanted to fast-track yourself into farming, tobacco was the route, where with hard work after several good seasons in saving your profit-sharing bonus you could accumulate enough to lease one's own farm. At Independence in 1980, many vacant tobacco farms were bought cheaply by cattle barons such as the Smiths, Beatties and Blacks for grazing. By 1996, these farms were selling at a premium, and most had returned to tobacco production owned or leased by young farmers. I could write a book on my tobacco experiences, so I better stop here. So yes, tobacco was the means of my entry into farming. Next week, I will cover some of my other enterprises.
A closing peace or trivia:
"A kilogram of tobacco sold on the Harare auction floors for US$2.23 in 2024. A kilogram of tobacco makes 1,300 cigarettes and sells for £16.8 per twenty pack in the UK in 2025. That is the equivalent of US$1,354 per kilogram. So, out of a kilogram of tobacco, the cigarette maker, retailer, and taxman makes £1,352. Admittedly, they have some costs but the manufacturers, retailers and taxman make some six hundred times the return to the farmer with virtually no risk. The taxman is by far the greediest but the manufacturers also make a killing."- Peter McSporran
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
Once again thanks for a really interesting article, remember visits to your farm and the interesting chats we had.