As I drive through Portugal, in the summer, the country is generally brown and arid. Suddenly, I see ahead a splash of green lawn. I immediately wonder if it is real irrigated natural grass or artificial turf. Nine times out of ten it is artificial. Why? Well, real grass takes time, attention and cost to keep it in its natural state, especially in our extended dry summers. A green lawn needs sun, rain or irrigation coupled with nurturing and mowing. An artificial lawn needs none of these. In fact, it requires no effort from the plot owner other than having enough cash to install it. No future management, no nutrient plan, no nourishment of any kind. It only requires a contractor to come and destroy all the natural roots in that particular patch of garden and replace it with a foundation of cement covered with an artificial plastic veneer, very poorly disguised as grass. In fact, one of our neighbours has simply painted areas green where the plastic has worn down to the concrete. It looks good from a distance, but if I were the occupier of the house, I would personally find it an eyesore. Do not look too closely or try playing outdoor games with your kids on it, you will be extremely disappointed.
“Some humans are not unlike cheap shiny furniture, scratch away the veneer and you find a cheap toxic inner being held together with tacks. The hard shiny surface hides an inferior interior” - Peter McSporran
I think life is becoming more and more like this. It is hard to find what is real. Especially attitudes and loudly proclaimed self-righteous beliefs. Like packaged goods, our packaging has become much more expensive and attractive compared to the content. With self-righteousness, there is often much more fancy packaging than content.
“Why have the self-righteous become self-validated banner carriers for perceived necessary causes on behalf of others?” - Peter McSporran
I remember as a child someone would give me a present and to make it look good, big presents are good in a child's eyes, they would place the gift in a large box or many layers of wrapping to make it look impressive. Many people are like this, the packaging just does not match the real inner person who is imprisoned by either fear of speaking their mind or an adopted agenda with so much grey that there is no substantive foundation for its existence. A human nature Ponzi scheme. Those that do not question are desperate to get on board, do not want to miss out, leaving the instigator laughing. The world press is their free advertising format and spokesperson. Of course with financial Ponzi’s, the silent majority do not invest their hard-earned cash, those that have done and lost, complain the hardest and loudest about the unfairness of things. The naive and greedy rush to be part of it. Financial Ponzi schemes are normally destroyed by the greed of the promoter and the long arm of the law. Theft is a crime that will be dealt with.
“Human nature Ponzi schemes are much harder to deal with as they steal your soul, your heart and your mind. They destroy freedom of thought. Things of no financial value but are of great personal value. There is no protection from the law for this.” - Peter McSporran
People even enforce schemes by intimidating the powers that be to remove your right to free speech by law. I wonder if under the spoken word veneer what the proponents of this new world order really think. I also wonder how sustainable it is or will it just leave toxic waste as our artificial lawns will surely do.
GP Catch-up
This week I saw my GP for the first time since February. He has been extremely sick with Covid-19. Although still having some after effects, he is back at work. These visits are always to review my blood sugar levels as I have type 2 diabetes. Of course, it was not as good since my surgery. I have stuck to the advised postoperative diet which includes porridge for roughage and lots of fruit. I never used to eat fruit, now I am addicted. I need to cut back as fruit is the main contributor to my elevated sugar levels. I rarely have chocolate, but enjoy a hard-boiled sweet in the car. If rice pudding is on the menu, that is another definite. I do not plan to give this up. This week at drinks with the boys I had a non-alcoholic beer to please my cardiologist.
I also had a further eye injection this week. Hopefully no more medical visits for a few months except for further eye treatment. The improvement it was showing has halted.
Highfield
Jack Torrance, the estate manager, proclaimed that he was sad to see us leave Moray Estates, although I think that was because the harvest was not finished, rather than our prowess as farmworkers. On returning to college, Mike had organised himself, me and a good friend Willy John off-campus digs at Highfield Farm. Highfield Farmhouse was owned by the McGregor family who was well-known dairy farmers in Ayrshire. In the first year, four friends, Tom Abrahams, Tom Allison, Ken Muir and David Johnson resided there, getting access to the farmhouse through David had gone to school with Willie, the McGregor senior's son. The school in question was a public school named Holt in East Lothian, known more for its liberal outlook rather than academia or sport. Holt, like Keil, is now no longer.
Three of us then joined David Johnson and Ken Muir at Highfield. We were Willy John Gillespie, rugby player and pig farmer from Derry, Northern Ireland, Mike, my companion since entering college and myself making five with only four bedrooms. I think they were all wise not to share with me, so Willy took over as roommate to Mike while the rest of us had our own rooms. I am sure Mike was sick of my hygiene habits and general misbehaviour. Our tutors told us we had taken a stupid decision saying we are doomed to fail by moving out of the residence, especially to Highfield. After all, 50% of those living at Highfield failed their first year. Needless to say, we did not heed their advice. Our rent for the house was the upkeep of both the house and the garden. The only time I spent in the garden was when I fell out my bedroom window one night, luckily the overgrown flower bed saved me from injury. In our final week, we sorted out the garden with the aid of a flame thrower. As for convenience it was only a kilometre from the college.
The five of us, along with Willie McGregor, set out to enjoy our remaining time at Auchincruive. David had an old souped-up Ford Anglia, the souped part being it just made more noise coupled with no suspension, making its arrival noticeable due to both noise and the strange angle it travelled at. The paintwork was also very distinctive. The exhaust at the rear always gave off sparks when it made contact with the tar. It was often replaced, but only after we no longer could put up with the fumes and noise when travelling in the back. Mike’s Beetle was our second mode of transport around college and for nights out, Willie would help with his Ford Lotus Cortina, also souped-up. Was this a Holt thing to have pseudo rally cars? From time to time, for long distances, Willie would be allowed to use his fathers Zephyr 6 from time to time. This could take all six of us with its bench seat in the front. One night we nearly lost it. On leaving a bar in Ayr we promptly jumped into the first blue Ford Zephyr we saw, started it up and drove off. After a while, Willie decided to switch on the radio to find it was not there. First thought was that it had been stolen. Second thought was why was there no hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been. Third thought, wrong car. We calmly turned around, went in search of the right car, changed cars and drove off. We wondered if the owner would have seen that his car had been moved. Willie’s younger sister Margaret (Meg) from time to time would join us. She was still attending Wellington School, a public school for girls in Ayr. How she got away bunking so much, I have no idea!
In those years, we could survive on £2 a week each for groceries and other household requirements. Each week we would take our £10 and go grocery shopping, always stopping at the Thistle Bar on the way home. I did not use washing powder, being reminded by Bubbles, Willy’s girlfriend and future wife, that my system was to pick a shirt from the bottom of the laundry basket each time I needed a fresh change of clothes, rather than including a washing machine in the process. How they put up with me I do not know? Drinks were 20p a pint at the student union, while at the Thistle, our favourite local watering hole, a little more expensive. Occasionally, we would help with the garden there for some free pints from the landlord. It was expensive gardening for him but he and his wife were very good to us. Dave had worked for a meat company, Wilsons, that did barley beef and veal. Not nice veal forced fed calves, fed a high glucose diet for ninety days then slaughtered. I think the main market for this product was Italy. However, Dave would get some cheap steaks for us once a week and an endless supply of no label tinned mince. It could have even been dog food for all we cared, hunger was a constant companion at college. Liquid chicken in the form of beer stimulated appetite, rather than satiating it.
Two years ago we decided to have a Highfield reunion to celebrate fifty years since leaving college. We had it a year early as one of our numbers was in poor health. I had kept in touch with Mike but the others I had not seen since leaving college. Meg joined us for a wonderful weekend but unexpectedly she died shortly afterwards. I will always remember her blonde locks and smiling face. She was one of the team, a real party animal full of life even 50 years later. The reunion was held at the Matfen Hotel and Spa in Northumberland. Very posh, visited by many for its well-known golf course. We did not play golf, it must have been the weather. Unfortunately, Willy and Bubbles could not attend while the rest of us attended with our wives. Much whisky was drunk. That is a sign of maturity, whisky replacing beer. Funnily enough although it was the sixties drug taking was not a problem at Auchincruive. People talked about LSD but we never came across it. Innocents?
Tough Times in Zambia
As I said last week the farmers on our re-settlement scheme in Zambia faced huge inflationary costs on the establishment of their tobacco units. Coupled with this, the tobacco prices stagnated, the worst possible scenario in business. Inflating input costs and static to deflating tobacco prices. We also did not understand how expensive untrained labour was in an intensive labour crop such as tobacco. We had budgeted for about 350 labour days per hectare of tobacco, the same figure we used in Zimbabwe. The actual labour days the first few years were closer to 600 labour days per hectare. Our early local cost input was inflated by this. As we had insisted, where possible our farmers should have irrigation. This was their saving grace. The irrigation not only allowed double-cropping through the same curing system, it allowed them to grow winter wheat as Zambia was unable to produce enough. The tobacco company frowned on this expansion in cropping while the banks loved it. Wheat prices were closer to import parity and with the added logistical cost to import wheat, this made growing wheat locally very viable. If we had relied on tobacco only, we would have all gone bust very quickly.
To add further aggravation, ZLT decided to run its own internal and external schemes based on our model. One in Mozambique and one in Zambia. The Mozambican scheme decided to base itself in the Chimoio area in Manicaland Province. An area I had looked at before committing to Zambia, rejecting it, as being too low in altitude and having the wrong climate. Both would have ensured low yields even with irrigation. The access roads were poor, coupled with no electricity precluding the use of modern curing systems. I told them it was doomed to fail. They did not heed my advice. ZLT’s sister company was Mozambique Leaf Tobacco (MLT). Tobacco traders do not have a lot of imagination. They did get a lot of volunteers as it was cheaper than our scheme to participate without the strict due diligence. Our scheme required you to contribute $30,000 minimum along with a proven above average tobacco-growing track record. The Mozambican scheme, they felt they could develop in a pioneering way with local raw materials to build the conventional tobacco barns. Their task in the first year was daunting. Clearing virgin land, cutting curing fuel in the form of timber and building the barns and sheds without the aid of steel frames. This meant all timelines lagged and even before the farmers got into production the scheme started to fail. The prices there, as with us, were very low. With the yields being achieved there, they could not cover costs. Many disputes arose between the farmers and the tobacco companies. All were doomed to fail except for Kevin Gifford who decided it was more suited to grow burley tobacco, air-cured. He was the only tobacco farmer to survive down there, still farming there today. He does not grow tobacco now, concentrating on seed crops which he markets through his company Phoenix. When I was with AgDevCo we helped fund this venture, but that story is for a later date.
Zambia removed Dave Bradshaw from being our liaison with ZLT to run their own Zambian scheme along with stopping any further expansion of our scheme. Once again they claimed it could be done cheaper. We lost a good sensible ally with Dave going, but also the possibility of reaching the scheme's full potential was removed. They were going to show us how you could develop a tobacco unit and grow the crop cheaper. The very opposite was achieved. Starting “Greenfield” without electricity already in place is very expensive. People underestimate how important access to electricity is to modern farming.
For us, it was probably lucky, as it was hard enough looking after the existing thirty-odd farmers without a further twenty-five. One of the stipulations of ZLT funding our scheme was that I had to be part of it, so under duress, we started growing tobacco on Zambezi Ranching and Cropping (ZRC) land under the name Soilmasters. We had already procured loans from the bank, for seed-maize, soya and commercial maize. We still had to develop irrigation, although I had secured a loan to build a large dam on the Chongwe River.
At about this time Mark Neves took over from Vernon Cole as regional director of ZLT with Zambia being one of the regions. Neves’s main motivation appeared to be self-interest. Not the farmers. His personal interest seemed to take precedence over the farmers or his own employers. From an early stage, he started to pressurise us to take on his “friends”, allocating them some of the prime farms. This self-interest by some became even more openly obvious when the farm equipment arrived for their own scheme. Their scheme was centred in the Choma area of Zambia, probably chosen as it was very similar to Karoi, a very good tobacco growing area in Zimbabwe, with the same latitude and altitude.
Unlike our scheme, the ZLT did not give the farmer choice of a farming program, purchase of equipment or procurement of inputs such as chemicals and fertilisers. They tried to convince us, quite forcibly, that we should also use them for procurement. Luckily, we resisted. An example of the things they got up to was convincing farmers to save money on fertiliser which, they claimed, could be brought in with hessian wraps for the tobacco. This made the fertiliser more expensive but relieving the farmer of the need to purchase tobacco wraps. It was so implausible. For one, the fertiliser bags are about a quarter of the size of a tobacco bale and the hessian wrap would be unusable as it would be contaminated with fertiliser. Tobacco may kill you, but chemical use to avoid contamination of tobacco was controlled more strictly than in food crop production. Another example were the tractors and equipment. One day I received a call from Dave Bradshaw to come down to the tobacco auction floors to see the newly arrived tractors. All second-hand with many of them requiring repair and new tyres before going to the field. Broken down tractors and second-hand equipment to start a new venture? Who were they kidding? Notwithstanding this, the farmers did an excellent job in growing a crop. Who was making the margins in all this? I can only presume those involved directly in the procurement. I am not sure about who but some in senior positions at ZLT must have been surely aware of the situation. The structure of this scheme also made it virtually impossible for their scheme farmers to become independent growers.
Tobacco prices on offer continued to be poor with all the Zimbabwean farmers who moved to Zambia really feeling the pinch. Those concentrating on field and seed crops fared better. The relationship with the tobacco companies became torrid, to put it mildly, and if it were not for Dave Bradshaw along with the intervention by Lawry Richards, the GM of Zimbabwe Leaf Tobacco could well have fallen apart with the downfall of the scheme. Our scheme was further protected by the strong legal agreement we had put together which at least stopped ZLT unilaterally closing it down which they probably would have. To replace Dave Bradshaw, Dave Micklem was put in his position to be a hatchet man where the opportunity arose rather than to support the farmers. A tough job, making him no friends and eventually having him fall on his own sword. Really tough times mentally and work-wise. Appeasing farmers, supplying their needs and trying to control the actions of our sponsors. Luckily the bank and ZLT never had a united front as lenders. Over the next few years, we suffered about 20% casualties, half due to their own endeavours or bad luck, the other half due to more personality clashes with the person that took Dave Bradshaw's place. Local ZLT management were sympathetic to the farmers, in the form of Phil Rusch. I think they had little say anyway, Neves being very dictatorial in the corporate structure. It was Neves sneer when speaking to farmers that upset them most, showing no empathy with the farmers.
During this time Chris Thorne decided to leave AAI as a partner and take up farming on his own, under the auspices of the scheme just north of Lusaka airport. Paul Cartwright, an ex Zambian farmer joined me as a partner and for the next ten years AAI grew. To be able to be financial advisors, especially to the banks, we had to register with the Zambia Securities and Exchange Commission.(SEC). More exams including stockbroker qualification. You never seen to escape from the need of qualification and or registration when you leave farming to become an advisor and consultant. I further took legal courses including arbitration. I even passed that making me a qualified arbitrator. A far cry from the fields.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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