Why I Love Agri
Agri is close to home for me. In fact, it always has been. I grew up in Yorkshire, right next to a very active dairy farm. The cows made excellent spectators for the yard cricket test matches fought out gruesomely between the Reynolds bros. Occasionally, a ball would land in their field, and then I would, in pursuit. The youngest brother seemed to do the lion’s share of collecting the ball, despite rarely being responsible for its leaving our garden. Hmm.
But I, too, made a good spectator. I paid a great deal of attention to the machines and operations of the farm. I knew a Massey Ferguson from a John Deere by about 2 years old, and developed an unhealthy fascination with tractors and combine harvesters. PTO-driven machinery is cool, sure, but we all know the powertrain is king.
Like literally every single other person in the world in about 2015, I read Sapiens. I found myself riled by Harari’s bleak perspective. He challenged my romanticised view of agriculture’s role in our transition from “brilliant ape” to “omg do you not have the iPhone 15 Pro Max?”. His stance, essentially, was that agriculture set in motion a series of events that culminated in a capitalist and socially unequal world.
I feel a bit more optimistic, and see the other, shinier side of the coin: we can trace everything great about human civilisation back to someone’s decision to stop nomading around, chill for a bit, and decide to plant some seeds. Maybe because I’m a highly anxious person, the idea of permanent flux and uncertainty holds limited appeal. I’d have been a bad nomad. A nobad. Good riddance, hunter-gathering, I say.
Harari and I did agree, though, that agriculture had changed the course of human evolution. So I had internalised agriculture as a love from a young age. I had then developed wanky philosophical beliefs about agriculture in some weird, rebellious, defiant protest to an international best-seller while I was at university. Plus ça change.
It is no coincidence, then, that my first business was an agricultural machinery importer. That it was in Harare, a homonym of my intellectual adversary, was a coincidence. My mum always teased that I didn’t care all that much about the business; I just loved the kit. I must confess: I really did love the kit. But I loved the business and its underlying purpose a great deal, too.
Zimbabwe’s agricultural decline had interested me before I arrived in the country, but once I arrived, it started to sadden me. Melancholic tobacco farmers with wisened faces would tell tales of times when “the Zim Pound was stronger than the GBP”; when “Zimbabwe was ‘the breadbasket of Africa’”; when farms were a commercial proposition, were businesses. “Mugabe and his cronies didn’t just break farming, they broke the farms”; “thousands of hectares of arable land turned arid”; “the economy has fallen to its knees”.
The macroeconomic situation was pretty dire. But the farmers did not share the pessimism of the old guard. They were hopeful and happy. The agricultural economy showed signs of rallying. Tobacco harvests were incredibly healthy, and there was a sense that other crops would follow suit. Tobacco had been stimulated by international investment and clever contracts that enabled farmers to borrow against their production. Even the best farmers accelerate faster with the right support…
I wax lyrical about the day the first container arrived to anyone who will listen. It was a poignant and incredible moment. Clearly, it has had a lasting impact: my profile picture here remains a photograph of my oil-stained hand and beaming mug.
We brought in milk drums, milking machines, maize shellers, maize threshers, chaff cutters, harrow discs, ploughs, mowers, irrigation systems, 2-row planters, and many, many more. Of course, also tractors and combine harvesters. All of the kit was designed for small-scale farmers, and indeed their small-scale farms.
Milk drums, because farmers were carrying their cows’ milk to collection centres, miles away, in chigubus. These plastic containers were also used to transport diesel. And beer.
Milking machines, because farmers spent hours a day extracting every last drop they could from their cows: time which could be spent on other areas of the farm.
The rationale goes on, but these were the extremes of resource efficiency. We expect our businesses to do more with less. These farmers expected to do more with nearly nothing.
Smallholder farmers were incredibly proud of their land. The vast majority of people we met and spoke to were eager to learn, to develop, to export. I sold one farmer some chaff cutters and maize shellers, and he drove me around his farm, pointing out every single crop he was growing. He exported tomatoes to Tesco in the UK. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smile, the pride.
I used to drive for hours and hours into the far-flung countryside corners of the country to meet farmers who had seen our ads in a ZADF publication, or the ZFU newsletter, and were interested in buying some kit.
Frankly, I was deeply in love with the country by the time we had stock to sell, so taking a bakkie off into the African sunrise with some truly exceptional playlists to keep me company was no ordeal.
So much discussion of Zimbabwe centres around its chequered past. Frankly, Kush and I only really cared about its bright future. That basic premise alone endeared us to the agricultural ecosystem. Farmers loved that we were there, that we were trying, that we were helping. The sadness I felt, noticing the end of an era, was replaced pretty swiftly by joy at the imminent arrival of another.
Yes, it was tough to do business. Inflation was over 550%. FOREX reserves were never disclosed, but put it this way: the IMF cash never really seemed to land. ‘No FOREX’ makes it hard to pay international suppliers. As a result, the government introduced an allocation system. They would grant the release of FOREX on behalf of certain private businesses each month. Some industries were higher up that list than others. Agri was at the top.
Despite that, Kush’s main job almost every day was lobbying our bank to apply more pressure to the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank to get US Dollars that we owned out of the country to pay our suppliers. We had angsty phone calls from Brazil, Turkey, China, and wherever else we were bringing stuff in from on a ‘fairly regular basis’ (read: daily), and we learned what it might be like to be a Tory MP, answering around the question, and never directly addressing the fact that we might, perhaps, owe them some money.
There were months and months where it was impossible to secure fuel. In fact, this caused riots that became so widespread and dangerous that the President simply turned off the internet. Boop. Off. You can’t organise a riot on WhatsApp if there’s no 4G. 0 internet nationwide.
The early days were hard work. But every new exposure to the problem we had set out to solve made us care about it more. Every new bit of kit that came in galvanised our enthusiasm further. Every iteration took us one step closer to building A Real Business. We bought stuff speculatively, then worked out how to sell it. We literally shipped product without knowing if we’d find customers for it. We pivoted from D2C to B2B2C, and learned the value of partnerships and channel. We underinvested in engineering (“how the f*** do I put this tractor together?”). But we kept going.
It was a baptism of fire, a vertical learning curve, and probably the best introduction to building a business imaginable.
Startup is startup, no matter what you’re creating. For me, agriculture sits squarely at the intersection of a lot of things: my bildungsroman, a lifelong boyish obsession with stuff and tinkering, my (erroneous?) belief that I could be an entrepreneur, and my love for Zimbabwe, to name but a few.
I saw the power that agriculture has to change someone’s world. I saw the impact technological advances — however incremental — can have on agriculture. I saw how hard people are willing to work on land to get it to behave, to produce, to earn. I think of the farm I could see from my bedroom window as a child, and compare it to the scorched sands of that one farm in Chinhoyi.
Agriculture has fascinated and beguiled me all my life. The history, the philosophy, the machinery, the impact, the business, the dependence we (mostly unwittingly) have; the role it plays now, has always played, and will play in the future.
So, yeah, I’m really pleased we won the Messium deal.
