Smallholder farmers diversify to stay afloat

Obert Chifamba
Agri-Insight

IN recent times, producing and selling crops directly to customers and earning good prices at the same time has become a lot of effing work for most smallholder farmers.

In general, the practice allows farmers to connect directly with consumers, eliminating brokers, distributors and others between the producer and consumer.

It creates an opportunity for farmers to exercise more control over the pricing of their merchandise and receive a greater share of the market value in the end. Those who have gone the extra mile to value-add their raw products through additional processing into jams, jellies, cider, wine, pickles and many other products have made good earnings.

The more adventurous ones have even gone to the extent of opening their farms for agro-tourism in which case they do not sell products but an experience so shrewdly packaged that many consumers eagerly seek to go through it. Such farmers have also made decent earnings from just selling products of their acumen whose production processes can easily capture the imagination of those not directly involved in their execution.

Besides this, selling directly to consumers seems to be fast establishing itself as one of the most rewarding tricks of the trade because it usually eliminates the drudgery of spending hours on end searching for a go-between to locate a buyer or consumer. It deletes the cost that usually comes with engaging someone to do the job while also doing away with the hassle of lengthy storage periods on the farm.

However, it is not as rosy as it always appears to be from a distance. Selling directly to consumers has its own bunch of challenges that the farmer has to surmount in the course of marketing his produce.

Today, my offering will not look at those challenges that farmers face at particular points of the season but will zero in on an important discourse that the farmer is prepared to have every day given that some of them are now daily sellers of fresh produce, as they pursue their dreams of turning their farming operations into real businesses that generate incomes all the time.

Selling produce directly to customers has its own challenges both on the production side and sales side. From the production point of view, it simply means that the farmer needs multiple crop options to take on to the market with some of the crops expected to be available all year-round or throughout out the season.

Essentially, this means the farmer has to contend with a lot of succession planning and astute management of the field. This comes as additional demands to the already heavy load the farmer always bears when he produces his crops seasonally.

The long and short of my argument is that it takes a really committed farmer to produce crops that he sells directly to customers without having to look for a place to stack his products and selling from there or looking for a middleman to convey the produce to consumers.

The first important thing is for the farmer to secure the regular and reliable customers to whom he will sell the produce so that he does not produce without anyone in mind. Selling directly to consumers also helps reduce post-harvest or storage losses, as in most cases some of the customers prefer coming to the farm and getting the produce straight from the field in its raw and fresh state.

On the sales side the farmer has to get into a routine of waking up super early every day to take produce to the customers. He has to load produce onto a truck on the farm, then off-load it when he gets to the market then sell.

The process usually chews into the time he will be expected to be doing other important farming chores so he has to make sure no part of the business suffers. The farmer has to play the balancing act to ensure both production and sale of produce go on unaffected, which is something a less committed farmer cannot stand.

Then there is this issue of farmers producing the same crop at the same time. Very often, farmers end up stuck with stacks and stacks of produce, which fail to attract buyers because they will be fast losing quality under improper storage conditions because of the unavailability of cold chain facilities.

This problem is usually rampant among smallholder fresh produce farmers who incidentally sell the produce at the same markets where they end up pushing themselves into fierce competition for buyers. Under such circumstances, only those with the best quality produce or those with better negotiating skills will survive while the rest will return home empty-handed after a day’s toil. In most cases produce ends up rotting after spending days on end without attracting a buyer.

With proper communication among themselves, farmers can easily deal with this problem. They need to come up with a crop production calendar that is rotational and allow each or a number of them to produce a particular crop at a time so that they do not flood the market thereby creating competition among themselves. The idea of farmers competing among themselves for customers does not usually end well, as some will eventually sell produce at give-away prices to escape losses.

There is also the problem of poor market access and limited access to market information, which adversely affect their marketing performance. Sometimes lack of market consultancy, high commission chargers and poor transportation become the farmers’ biggest undoing during the marketing of their produce.

Most smallholder farmers have a hard time securing transport to ferry their produce to markets due to lack of roads, vehicles and money. They often have to carry their produce from the farm to local markets on foot or by bicycle, which can be challenging and time-consuming.

This means that they often have to sell their produce at very low prices because they cannot transport it to places where there is better demand for food. Those that can access markets like Mbare Musika have to contend with using public transport like buses at times while lorries they usually hire look at many factors before fixing charges.