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How I Became a Profitable Maize Farmer Overnight

I was on the brink of giving up. Okay, let’s rewind a bit. I have always wanted to venture into farming, maybe it’s because I believe there is so much potential in the business. But every attempt at getting started and keeping up with it has been a serious pain. Who did I offend? First, […]

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Last Updated May 16, 2018

I was on the brink of giving up.

Okay, let’s rewind a bit. I have always wanted to venture into farming, maybe it’s because I believe there is so much potential in the business. But every attempt at getting started and keeping up with it has been a serious pain.

Who did I offend?

First, I started out trying to cultivate maize on one acre of land and let me just tell you now, it’s not beans. The headache started with the farmer I partnered with because even though he had some experience with farming, he didn’t know too much about maize and he could have advised me on a better seed variety. At the end of the day, I waited to harvest the remaining maize and prepare to sell. What no one tells you about agriculture is the insane risk that is involved especially if your farm isn’t insured, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I didn’t insure my maize farm so I bore all the losses.
Thankfully, I was relaying this story to a good friend of mine who had a smile plastered on his face while I was recounting this horror story of an investment. At the end of my long pitiful recount, my friend just shook his head and told me that had he had already read a lot of similar stories online and that was why he took the safer and more guaranteed route. He told me that he also had a maize farm and his farming has been nothing but smooth. He didn’t have to deal directly with farmers, because he sure didn’t have the time to train them, neither did he deal with labourers or selling the farm produce at the end of the farm cycle. I almost fell off my chair. 

Is this real?

So I probed further and discovered that my friend had invested in agriculture through a platform that took care of dealing directly with farmers. The farmers had hands-on training from dedicated farm specialists, they were given improved seed varieties and were always on-ground to monitor the farmers, from planting to harvest to getting off-takers for the product so that there is nothing like wasted produce or the farmer can’t sell after harvest. To say “I felt I had just been handed a hot EXPO to profitable farming in Nigeria” was an understatement. I was excited.
So, I invested the little money I had left from my misadventure into my old maize farm and used it to sponsor maize farms on this Agric platform which I later got to know was Farmcrowdy. Of course, I still did my research and I kept seeing nothing but good reviews, coupled with my friend’s testimonial, I just went ahead. Sat down, relaxed and waited for the harvest while getting all the farm updates on my dashboard. At the end of the farm cycle, I collected my initial investment plus pure profit, without lifting a finger. I have not looked back since then and I have continued to sponsor more farms to build my personal investment portfolio in the agriculture space. My name is Nnaemeka Obinna and I am now a proud farmer because I farm on Farmcrowdy. Better to work smart, than to work hard!
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