Good News. Diversification.

Misty mornings with scorching hot days sum up our recent weather.

Good News.

After a hectic two weeks of doctor visits, scans and numerous blood tests, the overall outcome is a lot more positive than I imagined it would be at the outset. My prostate cancer has a good chance of being treated successfully, this is for the second time, the first time six years ago. I have also just learned that my stomach cancer review has come up with a negative result. It is two and a half years since my surgery. On Monday morning, suffering from a slight hangover caused by three glasses of wine due to our neighbours popping in with wine and chorizo the night before, I went and had my final scan at a private clinic. This was due to the University Hospital likely being too busy to cater for my specialist needs for a quick result. Here in Portugal if you're treatment or tests are urgent and the hospital or Government clinics are too busy they refer you to a private hospital or clinic at their expense. Very sensible in helping cut delays. Therefore, on Monday morning I found myself in a clinic on the banks of the Mondego River in Coimbra being looked after by a very pleasant lady of African descent who spoke perfect English. While always courteous, the clinics rarely tell you if your tests are good or bad, they leave that to your doctor. In this case, perhaps due to the conversation around the size of the tumour that had been removed which seemed to impress her, she let on in not so many words she thought all was well.

The location of the clinic is on the banks of the Mondego River. The old landmark Hotel Astoria with the tower can be seen in the distance.

That improved my mood in looking forward to the visit to the surgeon on Wednesday, an appointment I was not sure I would have as the Government doctors were due to strike that day.

“Despite your efforts to be complacent, new pains when you have cancer always ring alarm bells. With cancer, for your own well-being, both physical and mental, you cannot ignore them, like the boy who cried wolf too many times.” - Peter McSporran

My German friend, Micheal enjoying a Sunday evening cigar.

That evening, Monday, we were asked for sundowners with some South African friends Ian and Luiza Hayes. For me, that night no alcohol only zero alcohol beer. As usual, I left my phone indoors as we enjoyed a cool evening on the verandah, the daily temperature has been in the thirties when my phone rang as it always does when left unattended. I actually did not hear it as I am half deaf, so it was Rozanne who brought it to my attention. On retrieving the phone I immediately saw it was the surgeon's number at the University Hospital. Aargh! I was sure it was to change my appointment to cater for the strike. I tried to call back in vain, their phones do not take incoming calls. Then my phone rang again, this time it was my eye doctor's nurse, the time now being after six o'clock in the evening. She called to confirm my appointment for yet another poke in the eye on Thursday despite the strike, not surprising as they are a private surgery and specialist. Then it rang again and it was my surgeon on the line to tell me he would be unable to honour our appointment on Wednesday, but as he already had my previous blood tests and that morning's scan to hand if I was happy, we could do the consultation there and then over the phone. Of course, I said yes and he went through everything thoroughly as he does but the long and the short of it is, my stomach cancer is still in remission and my next review is in six months' time. I asked how long the reviews would last and he said they would stop after five years but the longer they are negative, the better it is.

This Sunday our Portuguese neighbours, Lucillia and Augusto brought wine, chorizo and Marcello black pudding. John Tidy also joined us.

I also had blood tests for my local doctor's six-monthly MOT this week for my coming appointment with him on Friday. These were also fine so there was no urgency to see him other than for my prescription for my twelve daily pills which if necessary he will send by email. He is easily contactable by both e-mail and phone. I am looking forward to my prostate treatment positively as now I do not have to worry about the other health issues for six months. Importantly, my treatment will not be this month which will allow me to go tuna fishing on the 17th, a trip we booked and paid for last year but was cancelled due to a storm. I had been worrying my treatment may have interfered with my fishing. Definitely looking forward to that, my fishing companions will be Rozanne and João, the owner of our local restaurant where we ‘Old Farts’ meet on Thursdays.

I wonder in how many countries a state doctor would call you after hours to fulfil a consultation that is in jeopardy due to possible strike action?

Diversification

In the late eighties, farming in Zimbabwe was going well with more foreign currency available for inputs including tractors and machinery. From the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, these were the golden years in Zimbabwe, not unlike the post-WWII period of the Golden Leaf when many tobacco farmers drove Cadillacs and took overseas trips. In those days tobacco was planted with the rain in early December so once the selling season for the previous year finished in September there was a period for travel, hunting and fishing. This only applied to tobacco farmers, with the advent of water planting and irrigation removing those free days from the calendar. Those must have been the days.

For our generation of farmers having money available but unable to use it on foreign travel or expensive toys due to foreign currency restrictions, all of us farmers reinvested heavily in our land and diversified, most of us comfortable in this as we had bought it post-independence, not in colonial times. It also allowed us to build up our fixed assets and livestock numbers as there were excellent tax write-downs. More fools us as it would prove to be.

“In Africa if you have an independently owned farming business you have to learn to ignore some business opportunities, certainly do not over capitilise and importantly do without luxuries while spending your money wisely on your farming operations at the same time building up a secure nest egg for your retirement or forced political eviction. No matter where you live in Africa, land tenure is fragile.” - Peter McSporran

I decided to look into pigs. The reason I chose pigs was to improve my monthly cash flow. Our summer crop income each year was between June and September. As my crops were seed crops, the final income for them was closer to Christmas, an added benefit for seed producers although this made cash tight at the time to buy the next season's inputs. Those of us who grew winter wheat got paid for that in November, but this still left six months of little or no income and burgeoning costs. All your major main inputs; fertiliser, coal, chemicals were purchased in September while our peak electricity, fuel and labour costs including planting, reaping and curing ran through to April the following year. By that time I was employing on the three farms some two hundred and fifty full-time staff and anything up to one hundred and fifty casuals, mainly women. Huge monthly outlays. Even the cattle income, a thousand fat cattle per annum were all sold before the rains. Without hard standing and shelter, you could not fatten cattle with grain in the wet summer months. Many farmers turned to horticulture and floriculture. One of my neighbours, Ian Gordon, became one of the largest exporters of this and other producers of horticulture to Europe. Rather than horticulture, I decided to go into pigs, which although having its ups and downs proved worthwhile. My accountant John Knight was not happy, he said I should be growing export crops to access foreign currency. He was to prove to be right.

One of the girls' birthday parties on the farm. The lady on the left is the late Cathy Rosier and the lady in the background is Fiona Smith.

I employed an ex-school teacher as my pig manager with myself overseeing it. I will not use his name but the designated manager who became a pigman through experience and my poor instruction turned out well, except he also brought us some headaches. He was gay. Being gay in a country where you could be imprisoned for being so, caused all sorts of headaches and to a man the labour outwardly seemed to despise them, privately it may have been different. Mentally, he was tough and despite being picked up by the police a number of times he stuck to his job. For me, it became a matter of principle to keep him on. I spent a lot of time protecting him. I was later to employ a lesbian as a cattle manager, she never faced the same challenges as her male counterpart. I will chat about her later as she became a very dear friend. From scratch, using our own builders and workshop, we built two hundred and twenty sow units on the back of an annual contract for four thousand five hundred baconers with Colcom.

We sourced our gilts and continued to do so throughout our production from Lynne Bean in Shamva and to a lesser extent from CG Tracey in Enterprise. We used F1 Landrace X Large Whites which we put mostly to Duroc when available as they produced a leaner carcass to suit our market. We grew some of our maize on the farms but still had to buy large quantities each year along with soya meal and other ingredients for milling and mixing also done on the farm. More shed building.

I also bought a private property in Borrowdale, Harare, which we planned to use when in town, but in fact we ended up letting it out. It was a lovely home, with an all-weather tennis court and swimming pool easy to let out to an NGO expat for foreign currency.

My neighbour Des Bruk Jackson also decided to try pigs but he went one step further than me, he also diversified into crocodiles. He obviously knew little about them when they first arrived at some nine inches long growing I think to about a metre or slightly bigger at slaughter. He retained some as breeding stock which he kept in a fenced-off area just outside his garden, although most crocodile producers collected eggs in the wild. The two per cent released into the wild had a much greater survival rate hence the huge numbers you see on Lake Kariba and on the Zambezi River nowadays. No unwanted visitors would bother him in future. The thing is, he underestimated these reptiles' agility and for the first few years, there were often escapees which he had to retrieve. We all became much more alert when visiting him. I also learned crocodiles are very intolerant of even a very low electrical charge, Des on occasion losing large numbers from a short in the heating system in winter. All of us livestock farmers, chicken, pig and cattle, would supply him with our dead animals. Our staff would eat the animals that died if given half a chance, but we never allowed it. The few farmers that did allow their staff to butcher and eat freshly dead cattle would soon stop when they found their cattle mortality jumping.

John Gordon, one of my more dynamic neighbours, got involved in Modrho, a company that manufactured tobacco bulk curers. John soon converted most of his tobacco curing to this system and in doing so mastered the art of curing tobacco so that it was very similar in flavour and texture to conventionally cured tobacco from a barn. Having an aeroplane, in curing season he spent most of his time flying around the country. On becoming a shareholder and director of that company, he spent more time away from the farm. He also got involved in property and set up an agricultural buying service in Harare. This was not enough for him and he fenced off the main part of his property for wildlife, he had a great interest in this, bringing in species not just from Zimbabwe but from Zambia. Many of these species were depleted through poaching. It was lovely to go around his game park in his old petrol/paraffin Land Rover with a beer in hand in the evening. A great place to keep our overseas holiday and business visitors happy on a quiet day. It also had the added benefit of being on the boundary of Mede Farm which I leased from the Belinsky family at that time, securing that side of the farm as it was patrolled by his game scouts. What amazed me about this exercise was how many animals sought sanctuary on his land once it was protected. Some like kudu would jump in and out, others were happy to stay.

Many of my remaining neighbours, including the Vermaaks and Whaleys went into broiler production. Fast food had come to take advantage of Zimbabwe's growing economy. Yes, the Golden Years.

Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.