Hello Hive
You might be wondering why we have chosen to do a mixed cropping on the commercial farm planting we are working on. Most commercial plantations prefer to plant a single crop, and if there are going to be two types of crops, then the fields will be divided into portions to contain each crop separately.
This kind of system is often practiced in places with available land resources where there is no payment for leasing land and some other expenses have been beating down, but for this current work on land, a whole lot has been spent on leasing, clearing, and planting. While there are still more expenses ahead, talking about weeding, either by hand or chemical application, harvesting, and transportation of the produce to town, All of these expenses are in thousands of Naira, and to maximize profit in this system where we have spent so much, we have to practice mixed cropping and harvest a variety of crops to meet up with the capital input here.
A quick breakdown of the financial input of cultivating an acre of land is
- Leasing 20k ($14)
- Clearing labor: $10,000 ($7)
- Ridging and plowing 30k ($21)
- Cost of purchasing maize 🌽 seeds and planting laborr. 36k($25)
That is a total of 96k ($67) spent so far to work on one acre of land and cultivate a single maize crop. Weeding and harvesting may take an estimate of at least 60k ($42). That will be a total of 150k ($104), by my own estimation.
The market price for purchasing a bag of corn right now is about 40k naira ($24). In order to meet the expenses, an acre of land must produce a minimum of 4 bags.
I believe that you see why it will be more profitable if we include other crops and practice a mixed cultivation of crops that can cohabit together.
On my own portion of of land, I have planted maize and soy beans, which are 7 days old today and already germinating. In four months, these two will be ready for harvest, which makes it easy to embark on the second farming session. The crops to be planted in the second session will include cassava and Guinea corn.
Cassava has just been introduced, we have gone round to lookout for some good specie that has a one year life circle now so that it can grow to maturity about this time next year and the farming session can be renewed and started all over again.
Planting started this morning but work begin from my coworkers end of the farm and hopefully mine will be planted before the month runs out. Remember that working on the large plots of land takes time and depending on the number of labor workers that come around to work per day.
The cost of purchasing a truck load of cassava is $60,000, and the finance needed for planting labor is $20,000 ($14).
This truck load of cassava was purchased for that amount and succeeded in planting only 2 acres; hence, the cost of covering one acre of land with cassava is about $40,000.
Adding this to the overall cost above, we have about 40k ($28) in addition to 156k ($224), making about 196k ($136) above the estimated cost for growing two species of crops on a commercial land area in this part of the world.
Planting cassava stems is one of the easiest tasks on a farm. All we need to do here is cut the stems into smaller pieces, which we plant at intervals in the soil in between the gap spaces left while planting maize.
That is the update from our work and exercise on the farm and I do hope that you have been learning a lot from our commercial farming experience so far, thank you for stopping by.
I also plant cassava in my farm.😀 But my farm isn't a commercial farm, just for family consumption with little sales out of it.