Monday, May 27, 2013

La Rose Agroforestry Update


Starting a business is notoriously difficult and undeniably risky. Some businesses – restaurants, bars, hotels, just to name a few – are avoided because of their infamous record of seemingly inevitable failure. But farming perhaps takes the top position for “bad business ideas” in the popular imagination. All of the external factors – weather, wavering demand, the short shelf-life of produce – make farming seem like a preposterous proposition.

When I first embarked on my personal farming journey more than two years ago, I was given a lot of feedback about my decision. First of all, farming has a reputation of being a (at best) “breaking even” kind of business. The popular press talks about farmers staying afloat through subsidies and kick-backs. In Ghana, where I farm, no such mechanisms are in place to buffer a farmer from economic disaster. Aside from subsidized fertilizers, agro-chemicals, and hard-to-get seedlings, the government doesn’t do much to make sure a farmer will be protected in times of crisis. And that’s only if you are farming a cash crop that the government can reap some revenue from. 

But if farming is done well and envisioned as a long-term activity, it can be very enriching. I don’t mean this just economically, but also spiritually and socially. To work with other farmers is to work with the craftsmen of our contemporary society. The small-scale farmer is the origin of the "modern" world. The native Americans who domesticated maize in Meso-America, the Mesopotamians who domesticated various edible grasses in the fertile crescent, the West Africans who domesticated yams and oil palms, the south Pacific islanders who domesticated taro root – these were all small-scale farmers who selected better and more nourishing varieties of crops until towns and cities grew and populations expanded. Farmers created this world that we live in. To work with them has been the most enlightening and inspiring experience of my life.



But I don’t want to digress too much here. I want to provide an update on the state of La Rose Agroforestry here in the Volta Region of Ghana.

In mid-2011, La Rose Agroforestry started with eight acres of land in Guaman-Odumase. We then went on to purchase 20 more acres of land in Guaman-Oqui Kator and Atakrom. As of now, all 28 acres of that land is under cultivation with cocoa, plantains, ginger, and bananas. We also have another 15 acre plot of land that remains fallow in the hills of Ketse-Nkwanta along the border with Togo.

The 28 acres of land under production, in terms of crops, breaks down like this:

Cocoa: 12,200 saplings (most of which are nearing their first yielding period)
Plantains: 10,000 corms (each corm containing three or four “shoots” that will yield one head of plantains each)
Bananas: 2,200 corms (see above)
Palm Trees: 70 (to be uprooted and tapped for palm wine, and then replaced with cocoa and plantains)
Ginger: 3 acres, planted with over 27 kilograms of rhizome cuttings

Intercropped among these five major crops, we also have taro root, cassava, papaya, mango, and kola trees.

So far, we are producing revenues of around $2000 per month in plantain sales. We also get a further $200-$300 from selling bananas. Our expected revenue for our first year of cocoa sales (probably one year from now) will be about $15,000. That number will increase as the trees become more productive. Ginger has a return value of %500, so the $1500 we invested should yield about $7500 within seven or eight months.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, that is really awesome man. I was over on your kavasseur blog and I saw that your were located in Ghana, and that led me here. I spent an incredible year in Ghana studying African History and African Philosophy at the University of Accra, and that's why my eye was drawn to your bio. I have to say, I'm really impressed that you were able to start a profitable business in a different country. Ghana is amazing and the people are just incredible, but I can't imagine trying to move my life and start a business there. Good for you, man. I hope great things keep happening for you and I'll be keeping up-to-date on your blogs as, for what it's worth, you seem like my kind of Obruni.

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