Harvest time

I’ve hit that time in a Kosele trip where the amount of work still remaining and the amount of time left to do it in seem to be heading off in different directions. Each time I come to this point there is a greater urgency to each day which, when managed properly, is a very positive pressure. Tomorrow is day one of our ambitious training programme and I’m looking forward to getting started. Once the planning has been done I hate hanging about. Patience is a virtue that I don’t always think I’ve fully cultivated.

The remainder of the week promises to be a very hectic time on the farm. At our Senior Managers’ meeting today we set out the timetable for harvesting our maize. We are hoping to have gathered it all in by Friday. Duncan, our farm manager, is still optimistic that we will pull in a good harvest. If this is the case it will test our storage facilities and post-harvest management. This is usually a major challenge in Kenya. As we are planning to eat the maize ourselves we won’t have the problems associated with transporting the crops to market that larger producers experience. It will be interesting to see how we manage the drying and bagging up of our crop. Ten sacks of maize kernels is quite a lot of produce, given that each sack of finished maize comes from the process of drying cobs of corn and stripping off the kernels by hand. It looks like being an all hands on deck operation with help from the Agriculture College students, the older school pupils and our day staff. Still, it’s a nice problem to have.