Farming as a business: How some farmers embraced it inadvertently

UNTIL recently, the idea of the communal farmer being considered a businessperson seems to have been eluding the public scrutiny. Not once in my journalism profession stretching over two decades do I recall having seen a special on the subject, or even a segment on the evening news about the communal farmer down there in Maranda being referred to as a businesswoman or man.

And neither did the majority of that category of farmers even consider their operations as some kind of business that would require them to uphold some degree of professionalism that would even require them to get trained to be the best they can be.

They have not drawn any business plans and no one, including the banks that have over the years funded operations for that clique of farmers who commercialised their activities to give them a business face, have looked in the communal farmers’ direction.

Today, all that has changed. Every farming activity must be allowed to bring out the business element in it.

The farmer must be able to fulfil the tenets of the global Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) and the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS 1) tenets of becoming food secure and economically sound using proceeds from farming. This means the farmer has to produce enough for the belly and surplus for the market after which she can provide for her dependants effectively.

The Second Republic has made it intentions clear on the matter – ‘farming should be treated as a business.’

This entails that while farming provides a means for meeting household subsistence needs, the rationale is to add value out of this practice that must be business-like.

This is where financial literacy knowledge and farm management skills are crucial and necessary for rural communities in realising the value of agriculture for an improved income and sustainable participation and living.

Of course, such an eventuality would require farmers to be trained to operate like businesses.

They will need financial literacy skills so that they can prepare proper documentations as one of the requirements of lending agencies to access small loans.

This will come across as a form of private-sector development to sustainably increase the profits of low-income, smallholder farmers and involves technical and institutional capacity building.

Government has also not left things to chance and has deployed business development managers and extension officers across the country who can lead the charge to transition from subsistence to commercial production.

Essentially, this becomes agricultural business, also known as agribusiness, which is the farming, management, production and marketing of agricultural commodities, such as livestock and crops.

The farming business field includes resource management, farming, conservation, ranching, and sales.

But the success of this push by Government requires a fertile landing spot.

The farmers must be willing to abandon their traditional way of doing business and treat everything they do in the same manner other businesses treat their activities.

They must remember that when they do farming for the market, they are practising business.

It is a business in the sense that they use land, labour and capital to produce goods for sale. Farmers literally do farming driven by the hope and expectation of profits like in any other business.

Interestingly, most farmers usually seek to use as little of the scarce elements of production as possible to produce the most of the goods that are wanted.

They also seek the widest market for their produce, and thus the highest prices available, which is a sure demonstration of the fact that most of them have for long been treating their operations as businesses but they were not aware of it or may have deliberately not chosen to acknowledge that reality.

The successful farmer will keep careful accounts and plan her investments of time and capital so as to maximise her income.

In fact, the time is nigh for people to debunk the belief that each time there is talk about agriculture, it is just crop farming: soil and land preparation and sowing, fertilising, irrigating, and harvesting different types of plants and vegetation and it ends there.

Crop farming is just one element of agriculture with the like of forestry, fishing and raising livestock also claiming their spots on the long list of categories.

An appreciation of the critical role agriculture plays in citizens’ lives will also allow farmers to realise that what they are doing is important and not just any other activity but something that helps sustain life by providing food and contributing to economic development.

There is no way farming cannot be a business when it is responsible for the creation of numerous employment opportunities along the agricultural value chain so the farmer must always treat herself as the epicentre of all agriculture related businesses.

Farming also provides opportunities for economic equity and helps people prosper around the world, for example, since the year 2000, the agricultural growth rate in Sub-Saharan Africa has surpassed that of any other region in the world (approximately 4, 3 percent annually), contributing to the region’s economic gains, according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Armed with such a rich resume, no right-thinking individual would begrudge farmers for even emulating the lizard that jumped from the high ‘iroko’ and bragged that it would praise itself if nobody did.

They surely are doing a lot of good for everyone and the least people can do is to treat them as serious business people in the same manner they treat the OK supermarkets of this world.

It is, however, refreshing to observe that most farmers today have managed not to just think outside the box but removed it completely to broaden their scope of doing business.

Farmers have since realised that they are in farming to make a living and in the process contributes to the development of the national economy.

Their success will also touch lives of people even outside Zimbabwe given the fact that agricultural products from this country always find their way out through exports.