As if the South African economy had not already been harmed by corruption, it would appear that they now wish to duplicate Zimbabwe’s disastrous land reform program. I am sure those South African farmers and business owners feel déjà vu, having witnessed events in Zimbabwe and their effect on our country’s economy. Is Africa, as a continent, unable to learn from the mistakes of others?
One sure way to undermine an economy is to remove the security of property rights, which affects not only those who lose the land directly but all those who provide it in inputs, including finance to those that market and process the products. Further, it is the one way to ensure the country in question will not be able to feed itself, destroy business confidence and professionals and skilled labour will take their talent elsewhere.
“If you want to destroy an economy quickly, you only have to undermine property values by removing security of tenure. Africa seems unable to understand this.” - Peter McSporran
This week, we visited our friend Jane Crossman and her daughter Sophia in the Algarve. Jane and I became great friends in Zimbabwe through my late dear friend and her sister Sally Sandeman. Sadly, like Sally’s husband, Ian, Jane’s husband, David, also died tragically in an air crash some two and a half years after Ian's death, flying his plane in at Hippo Camp on the Kafue River in Zambia. She, Sally, and my good friends Daphne Powell and Peter Horsman were among the reasons we chose Portugal as our retirement home. Due to my illness, it has been nearly three years since we last saw each other so plenty of reminiscing about the good old days in Zimbabwe in the evenings. Sadly, Sally and Peter are gone, and Daphne now lives in Cirencester in the UK. Sally and Peter succumbed to cancer while Daphne survived it, as I have to date. I sometimes wonder if the stress of the events in Zimbabwe contributed to us getting sick. It is four years since we last visited the Algarve; the last time, on the night of my return, I was admitted to hospital with heart failure and, thereafter, diagnosed with stomach cancer as being the underlying cause. Whatever, it was a great few days with dear friends.
On our weekly family call this past Sunday, my eldest daughter, Storm, said that I am too prone to ‘labelling’ people. Told in a manner of accusation, although fun, I decided to look up what it meant. ‘Labelling’ people seemingly can be negative or positive, but in this modern world, labelling people is considered poor form. Thinking a bit more about it, I realise that I have probably ‘labelled’ people throughout my life. The reason I bring it up is that every Sunday evening I look forward to another episode of The Farming Life. This Sunday evening, as I watched, I was once again a bit disappointed that some of the families involved in the program were what I call ‘hobby’ farmers. That is, people who farm on a scale that is impossible to support themselves, let alone their families, so logically, they must have income from other sources or spare capital. Do not get me wrong, some of those families featured in the program are genuine farmers struggling to make a living under challenging circumstances. I admire them, as in being so candid helps non-farmers better understand the trials and tribulations of farmers just to survive. Not just for income for themselves but to service their debts from banks to suppliers. I have no problem with diversification or taking on side work to survive, but when, as is sometimes the case, those portrayed have little chance of making a living from the enterprises portrayed. Hence, I label them ‘hobby’ farmers despite being genuine but perhaps naive in their endeavours. They are not the only people I label in reflection, so yes, I am prone to labelling people.
It must be well into my senility. Last week, I spelt my late great friend Joe Whaley’s name incorrectly, not once, but twice. My apologies to Wendy and the Whaley family for the error. It did not get past the scrutiny of Wendy, Joe's widow. I must record my thanks to her for correcting me. My WhatsApp messaging often comes out as gobbledygook, which I blame on the predictived text. In this case, I have no excuse. As an aside, some people always bring a smile to your face whenever you think of them. The late Joe Whaley is such a man.
Last week, I talked about tobacco, the mainstay of my farming operations. Today, I will speak about groundnuts. When I took up a managerial post at H.L. Edwards and Son at Inshalla farm in Enterprise, my first year was dedicated to red soil crops, including maize, seed maize, wheat, soya, potatoes, and onions. Maize, seed maize and soya I had grown with the Smiths at Umzururu, so learning about potatoes and wheat was an added benefit of this job. The Edwards were a very diverse operation and employed an old Scotsman, Bert Dodds, who looked after the pigs, supervised the onions, and grew horticultural products, including strawberries. I had little to do with the pigs and strawberries but learned a bit about the other crops. The Edwards had several properties, and one of these, Chifumbi, a fair distance up the Mtoko road closer to Oribi Township, was one of them. The soils were lighter, and groundnuts were grown there, as were most of the other crops mentioned. When the manager there left for greener pastures, the Edwards sent me up there to run that section. But the interesting thing was the groundnuts, a crop I really took to and at that time, if done correctly, could be very profitable. I always get sidetracked in my reminisces. Also, while working at Chifumbi, I was asked to grow a sorghum seed crop. I knew nothing about sorghum, and when that crop produced a record yield I was questioned by the seed house and its plant breeders on how I achieved it, I had nothing to offer them as advice other than that it may have been pure luck. Surprisingly, extremely high yields can sometimes occur in farming, which no matter how hard you try you cannot replicate. Luckily, I never grew another crop of sorghum after leaving the Edwards so that I could retain bragging rights. I should mention that in the Enterprise area, two excellent groundnut growers were happy to share their knowledge of the crop with me: Robbie McManus and my immediate neighbour David Stobart.
On agreeing to lease Diandra, I had in mind using groundnuts in rotation with tobacco. The reason being that the same irrigation, being moveable, could be used for both crops. We planted irrigated tobacco in the first two weeks of September and then planted groundnuts from the middle to the end of September. Any earlier, it would be too cold for them to germinate. Both would then be left to stress for six weeks, obviously the groundnuts had to have emerged through the soil. We always hoped the rains would arrive in late October to mid-November so later irrigation would be supplementary. This was not always the case, but in most instances, the nuts survived until the critical time at pegging, putting down a stalk, known as a gynophore, where the nut forms. Groundnuts, or peanuts as they are widely known in the shops, is not a nut but a legume. Anyway, providing the crop survived until pegging, and if this coincided with the rain, they did not require much irrigation although sometimes required at lifting to soften the soil. Unfortunately, this did not happen in some years, and then tobacco got priority in receiving water to the detriment of the nut crop.
We used portable mainlines and diesel pumps on the dam for the first few years. The pumping station was about one and a half kilometres from our house, and our brains soon came attuned to when the diesel engines stopped—even while asleep, requiring a quick trip down there to solve the problem.
The other thing with the groundnuts was that harvest generally followed the end of the tobacco curing season, allowing us to use the same heat sources to dry the crop. Harvesting and drying are critical times; nuts sitting in the fields getting rained on or stored with too much moisture are prone to aflatoxin fungus—a deadly fungus which requires very low levels for it to be toxic to human or animal consumption. The Grain Marketing Board (GMB) bought all the groundnuts in the early years and they would shell them at Cleveland and in a smaller depot in Rusape. The income from the groundnuts would be the first payments of the season, paid through the Farmers Co-op. The GMB shelling and sorting machinery was antiquated; the colour sorters, picking up diseased or discoloured kernels, never worked, and, therefore, after shelling, they had to be hand-picked. For many years, the GMB provided employment for some three thousand women hand-picking these nuts. I wonder how many were eaten as they always had their young children with them. Peanuts are not only very nutritious but delicious. All our groundnut crops were grown as seed. Our target yield was six and a half tonnes per hectare unshelled, and we more often than not achieved this. I was to become for a while, the largest groundnut grower in Zimbabwe winning the Grower of the Year.
With tobacco and groundnuts over the years, we were able to expand our irrigation, eventually making it possible to irrigate every field on the farm with over eight kilometres of underground ring mainline. The ring mainline allowed us to offtake anywhere without reducing the pressure, with pumps on both ends. I should thank Roger Thompson of Wright Rain for developing and advising me on irrigation. Roger and I knew each other from our army days.
So, for the first fifteen years of my farming, groundnuts were one of the mainstays of my farming enterprise until marketing became a problem with the GMB. For a while, Seed Co tried unsuccessfully to buy, shell and market them but as it was not a core business for them, they soon gave up. After that, my neighbour, Ross Gordon, John's son, set up a company called Reapers, but by then, I had stopped growing. By then, I was at the CFU and felt there was too much risk in growing them due to the market and added pressure on management. With hindsight, I should have persevered. Through groundnuts, I became involved in the CFU when our local oilseeds representative, Warwick Hale, convinced me to sit on the Commercial Oilseeds Association nack in 1986.
"With hindsight, I should have persevered with groundnuts as the benefit to the soil, the increased tobacco yield, the saving in fertiliser and the quality of the tobacco would have outweighed any financial loss directly attributed to growing them."- Peter McSporran
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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