Numbers still rule the roost in agriculture

Do not believe the hype about how numbers or quantity is not important in farming. This is a trap, especially if you are an emerging farmer.

Numbers do matter and will continue to be important as long as farming continues to matter.

The teachings by some established farmers that all that matter is quality are misleading and not encouraging.

Here is what we all need to appreciate: today’s established farmers were once novice farmers who farmed for numbers.

They did this for many years and were eventually able to slowly turn their large number of livestock into a few quality products.

Moral of the story? You cannot get quality without having enough numbers behind you… putting my head on the block here, but I dare challenge pundits to prove me otherwise.

It is only when you have amassed enough numbers behind you, enough sheep, goats or cattle that you can decide to take on the refining route.

Advising a novice farmer to do quality livestock right away is not wrong, as many I have profiled here have done so. But do not deny such emerging farmers the choice of starting with numbers first and working his/her way up to elitequality livestock.

Telling such farmers that only quality work in livestock farming is closing the door on them and preventing them from taking that vital first step.

Let such a person start with 10 animals and breed them until he has 50 or 20 of them.

He can now easily transition into quality farming, as he would have the economic means to do so by selling off most of his livestock to get better quality ones.

Livestock farming is more than just for prestige.

It is about survival; survival for the animal and its owner.

It is about selling one sheep to buy shoes for a child or fuel for the family car. Hence, one still needs to have a good number of commercial livestock in his kraal for these rainy days.

Imagine facing these hardships and you cannot sell off a single goat because you are afraid to get a below-market price for them and have to wait until the next stud auction some months away. It defeats the real purpose of farming.

That, dear farmers, is the choice I am referring to, and we all need to have this as an option.

If we do not, many aspiring farmers would not even look twice at livestock farming.

We would be taking away from novice farmers what many of us did; the road many of us travelled before a determined few took it even further and went into elite farming.

The challenge, however, is to know when to stop chasing numbers.

Knowing when you ought to be thinking of quality and how to go about it is critical to the success of your transformation into a farmer of note. You cannot be having hundreds of livestock for years and yet they do little to help your advancement.

A stud farmer might only have 20 ewes in his kraal, but they take care of him by fetching good prices whenever they are sold. Take a leaf from his page, and do the same with your commercial livestock.

The bottom line? Never discard the power of quantity in livestock, especially for novice farmers.

We all want to post beautiful animals on our social media profiles, but you might not even afford a smartphone for such posting if you leave out the option of having good numbers behind you in the livestock farming sector.