Hello Hive

This is one of the things we fear greatly as farmers in this community and part of the world. If planting and growing crops haven't been a problem, then why would crops be destroyed at the moments when they are ready for harvest and about to be taken home for our cooking?

Farming is gradually becoming like a hard fight to grow what we eat. You fight for good weather, fight for good soil since the bulk of farming lands are gradually turning into estates. We fight for the finances to grow our crops, and this is due to the inflation rate in the country; everything is on the high side, and even the seeds and herbicides to be used in the farms are expensive. The diesel needed for powering the tractors that cultivate farmlands is expensive, making farming highly capital intensive.

Another fight now is how to harvest our crops to avoid this kind of massive destruction. Farmers and animal rearers are in constant disagreement, as these animal rearers are careless and have no human feeling. All they care about is their animals, as if they do not eat or partake of the meals cooked from the crops farmers grow.

How can you release your animals to feed on people's crops when harvest is not yet concluded? In fact, the harvest for beans, rice, and Guinea corn is just starting. There will be lots of farm left over for these animals to feed on when harvest is completed; hence, I see no reason why one will let out his herds of goats into the farms to feed on our crops.

Yesterday evening I just took a routine walk to check on our farm nearby, only to be greeted by an empty field of beans where goats have been actively feeding on the beans we were preparing to harvest this weekend.

We have planted these beans in 3 different locations, and this is the one closest to the house. Animals from the neighborhood often find their way to the farm, and even though there are lots of grasses here, they prefer to feed on real food, and in this case they found our beans 🫘🫘🫘.

They are up. Virtually everything here, and for a beans farm that is estimated to give us about 20–40 kg of beans, we cannot tell if even 5 kg of beans can come out from here.
There is usually a lot to do about this time of the year and during harvest and it is always a rush to harvest this or that. Most of this rush at harvest is such that we can be able to harvest all of our crops before cattle rearers begin to carry their animals about for grazing.
Since they are a set of uneducated people, every effort to plead with them to hold on for us to harvest our crops first before they come grazing have proved abortive all this year. They put us under so much pressure to grow and harvest our crops for the field to be left for them. If you don't harvest on time, the let their animals loose without a conscience to come feed on the hard labour of farmers here.

The government hasn't found solution on how to control these herders as well and this is a serious challenge across the country. Some times they come out with weapons and if farmers try to stop them they attack farmers in the farm. This is just one of the pains they cause us and we are in so much haste to harvest our other crops.

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