“In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”
(Ecclesiastes 11:6)
The idea of being able to grow my food has been something entertained by me since my teenage days, thanks to the novel series titled, “LEFT BEHIND.” The book tried to depict how life shall be at the time of The Beast when people can no longer buy or sell except they receive the mark of the beast as prophesied in Revelations 13:17. It presented the reader with some very detailed and adventurous drama, and one key thing the characters of the book had to contrive was how they could get sustenance. While, after personal studies of the Bible, I do not agree with many things in the book, it did present us with the thought of how difficult life would be if one were not able to buy or sell with money. Life as we know it will be completely impossible, and if life is impossible then death, miserable death, is imminent.
So the Bible clearly says a time shall be upon this earth when you can neither buy nor sell. It is not a matter of if it shall happen, it’s a matter of when it shall happen. So the idea of setting myself free over time from the economy has occupied my mind and since food is the most critical and indispensable thing, the idea of being able to grow food filled my mind since that time.
While we today may not live to see the time of The Beast and we may as well do, yet the practice of self sustenance would still help us a great deal while we can still use money which would have the effect of making hard times less biting and good times happier. And there’s this added benefit that it will give you sound, practical, and firsthand knowledge and a lifestyle to bequeath to your children who may then be the ones to face those dreaded times.
While I lived with my parents, we lived in an apartment building which made it impossible for me to do garden, but by God’s providence I found a really nice place in an estate I could call a garden city. It had so much space to plant and do garden. I loved the place so much for it perfectly matched my taste. I was also able to get a piece of land on which I do actual farming. I have been doing both gardening around my house and actual farming too.
It is obvious that it is wisdom to grow food and ability to do this is security to the welfare of a home. It is also beneficial to the economy when people can grow food on their own in a passive way. By that I mean growing food without having to leave other professions one may be engaged in. It makes up abundantly for the shortage of food by farmers and so eases the demand on their produce thus having the potential of making the cost of food to be cheaper.
In this time of economic hardship world over and particularly in Nigeria, the new cool and heroic thing to do is to farm. Cool because it speaks of self-reliance (as big boys are self-reliant) and more people are beginning to show interest in it and is in vogue, and heroic because it is aimed at saving the economy. “Tada! Passive Farmers To The Rescue! Our Economy Is Saved!” Yeah, it’s that cool. But as cool and heroic as it is indeed, if you are not able to do all the labour of all your farming processes and stages yourself and must outsource them (like I sought to do), just keep off farming. You’d not only be losing money, you’d be compounding our economic woes.
In a system where there are no standards for the worth of work, labourers take advantage of people and overcharge farming hobbyists. During the time when I sourced for labourers to do my work I realised that they overcharge people. In the area, teachers are paid about N35k or so, but must teach up to four subjects to earn that amount. Meaning their per hour rate can be estimated to be as low as less than N200 per hour. Assuming they work up to eight hours a day to teach four subjects. Yet to do a work of twenty minutes, labourers can charge you, after much bargain, N1,000. Meaning their hourly rate is N3,000. More than ten times the rate of a teacher. I know the labour of farming may not be equated with teaching for its laboriousness, but it (being unskilled labour) cannot be more than ten times the rate of teaching. So you see that that rate is exorbitant and where unskilled labour is earning more than ten times that of skilled labour we are slipping towards crude barbarism. Since things such as these are not put into consideration to set fair standards of rates, and you’d be handicapped without their labour if you won’t do the work yourself thus making the cost of farming exceed the cost of buying food, it is best not even to farm at all.
One of the main principles of one of the first known rulers of Babylon named Hammurabi is the standards for wages and rates of labour he set forth in his book called “Code Of Hammurabi.” In the book he presented very minute details of standards to be used in business and private engagements and by this sought to establish a Babylon founded on justice. Like him many great leaders of remote antiquity saw the need for standards to ruling justly. I wonder why we in this age and time, though erroneously perceived as superior to times of antiquity, don’t see the need to use well thought out standards and would rather leave everything to whims, necessity, despondency, avariciousness, overvaluing of the worth of one’s service, etc. If progress and justice must be maintained, every dealings, both private and corporate, must have set standards, so that even when it is not required to be fully adhered to, people can be informed of the range of what they can charge.
Those who choose to look generous without giving proper thought to things pay labourers ample amount of money and after could still call them home to feed them. That is great of course. They’re generous. But it’s not so great when they’d take their proceeds to market and the poor can’t buy them because they must make their money back. In the end it’s not been generous at all. It’s just them wanting to look like a good person.
The person who chooses to farm rather than buy food would think he’s saving money, but this isn’t true also if you have to spend heavily on labour too. The cost on farming comes in bits and at different intervals so much that except when carefully documented (as of course all expenses in domestic life and in business should be carefully documented using a spreadsheet software) you’d not realise how much you’ve spent on the farming process. If you do, you’d realise that if you’re to take all that money, go to the market at harvest time when foodstuff are cheap (the same time you’re supposed to be harvesting your own crops), you’d realise that you’ll probably get more than what you’d have realised buying with the money you’ve spent on farming, and that means saving yourself the stress and time too. It was a proprietor of a school that told me this, and when I gave the matter a good thought and considered my expenses, I realised it most likely is true. So save yourself the stress.
This is how spending so much on labour compounds our economic woes. It is better to leave off farming to those who can really do all the labour at every phase of the farming process. They can do it and afford to sell it at an affordable price.
So provided that labour is costing more than ten times the earnings of teachers, to go into farming and still rely on others to do the labour is not wise. As said, you’d lose money and also compound our economic woes. If you can do your labour yourself then do it yourself. I would have recommended folding your sleeves and getting down to work on your farm yourself, but for noncommercial farmers farming should be passive, not an active endeavour. You can’t leave off your primary source of making money to become a farmer. So you can as well do without it entirely.
In summary, if you must go into farming, be careful to check and ensure that your expenses don’t outweigh your benefits. And your profit should outweigh your expenses by a lot because you’re putting in effort of at least planning and budgeting into the farming process. So getting food by farming isn’t as easy as grabbing cash and going to the market to get stuff. If it must therefore be profitable indeed, it must be profitable by a large margin to make up for both the money put into it, the time, and the work.
However, I do recommend, and strongly recommend, that every single soul ought to be a gardener. Gardening is not labour intensive at all. I am an active gardener and there are days I don’t need to do anything whatsoever in my garden and when there is work, between five and fifteen minutes a day would suffice, yet I’m growing so much food to save me a lot of money. And because it is done around your house, you can be flexible with the time you choose to do the work. Unlike farming away from your house, you can comfortably break down tasks into small pieces and do them one day at a time. The benefit of gardening is immense and the work minimal. If well done and arranged so as to establish an ecosystem around your house, it would also sustain a home. This way the goal of not relying so much on buying with money for sustenance is also achieved.
So while farming may not be for everybody, gardening surely is for everyone for reasons beyond this article. For that I recommend my article, “HOME GARDENING THROUGH THE EYES OF GOD.”
As you garden and move towards self sustenance, may God bless your labour with ample proceeds and grant you stability in life. Amen.
Prayer: Dear Lord, as we hold your word true that a time shall come upon this earth when men shall not be able to buy nor sell, give us wisdom to prepare for this so that survival shall not be with pains for us and our loved ones. This I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
