One of my favorite books to read as a child was GREEN FINGERS AND GRIT by Anita Davies. Mainly because I could identify with the lives of the young girls in the book.
They had goats, rabbits and vegetable patches to wander through each day, and I had similar animals and some local vegetable patches of my very own to wander through.
I grew up on a farm. Not the romanticized farms of country westerns complete with thoroughbreds and hunky cowboys in weathered tight jeans, but a farm all the same.
We lived in our own home, in Barnawa, Kaduna, with lots of land to spare, so my Father decided to become an earth whisperer.
And boy did he make the earth sing. If there was a god of subsistence farming, that god dotted on my Father. Plants loved him; domestic animals thrived under his care.
We grew Maize, millet, yams, cassava, beans, sweat potatoes, groundnut, okra, hibiscus, spinach, bitter leaf, waterleaf, pepper, tomatoes, papaya, mangoes, banana, guava, cocoyam and still had room left to grow flowers.
It was that kind of farm.
We also had animals; Goats, pigs, rabbits, guinea pigs, pigeons, ducks and chickens. Needless to say, I grew up well fed, but with brown nails from mucking out coops and pens and from tilling and harvesting.
Fast forward to a few decades later and I’m craving the same life I hated as a child. I wasn't the sort of child whose parents came home with shop-bought veggies in fancy packets, I was the sort who had to chase the chicken or go into the farm and harvest spinach or tomatoes or okra for lunch.
The sort who had to winnow dried corn from the last harvest for milling so the family could enjoy organic pap, or corn meal to go with the okra from the farm.
I thought life was cruel and unkind, even though I never complained about the abundance of food in my plate.
Our farm was mainly the subsistence sort. There were at least ten mouths to feed at any point in time, three times a day every day of the year, so the farm was kept constantly on its toes, and the dirt under our nails remained a constant feature.
But I am so grateful for that life. Growing up with nature like that, seeing the earth transform dried seed into beautiful green shoots and later into delicious produce taught me more about how wonderful God is than the bible could have done.
I learned patience; how to wait for the harvest, how to put in the sort of effort required to produce a directly proportional harvest and I also learned how to deal with loss, with unmet expectations, when the harvest, despite your best efforts, just goes wrong, because the sun was too eager, or the rains were too lazy to fall.
The lessons I imbibed are still growing within me, bearing fruit each in its season, and I can never be thankful enough to my father for choosing that way of life and making us live and learn the way we did.
Now I want to become a farmer and I’m making small plans towards it. Maybe it won’t happen this year, having lived on a farm a real farm I know the sort of sweaty effort required, so this desire to become a farmer is not born from some romantic whim, I know I have to be very ready or I might as well not bother so I’m planning on taking time off circular hustling to go to the Songhai International Centre in Porto Novo, Benin Republic for a beginners course in farming and related studies.
I found out during research that there’s a Nigerian version of the school here in Nigeria!
The programme was conceived when Cross River Governor Chibuike Amaechi visited the Songhai Centre in Porto Novo and decided it would work well in Rivers State.
Work began at the Rivers Songhai farm in 2010, before then a group of 105 young men and women drawn from the 23 Local Government Areas of the state had been sent to Songhai International Centre in Benin Republic for 18 months of training in various specialized Agric and Agro based areas.
The Cross River farm project sits on a 314-hectare land in Bunu-Tai, an agrarian community in Tai Local Government Area of the state and is about 20 times the size of the Porto Novo Songhai model (trust Naija to magnify the scale of any viable enterprise).
We are sadly letting the rest of the world leave us behind where agriculture is concerned. We have become a nation of wannabe White Collars, while reality is screaming that we need to explore the green and brown collar territories.
There’s money in the dirt, and Agriculture presents an amazing scope of opportunities which can be explored from tourism to journalism and from husbandry to processing.
For instance, this link- http://www.
The Agritec Africa Exhibition and Conference held in Nairobi, Kenya from June 23-25, 2014 at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi, Kenya. (I’m so sad I missed it.)
I want to be ready to for the revolution that is coming, I won’t be on the sidelines when it comes, I will jump right in, both feet, and I’m sure my nostrils will revel in the rediscovered heady smell of fertile earth, and this time I won’t mind the satisfying sight of earth-brown nails.
Olufisayo Olanrewaju is a poet, lazy writer, shower-stall singer and trained Broadcaster on an indefinite sabbatical.
She dreams of someday walking across a grain covered Africa, from Abuja to Zimbabwe, barefoot.
