Spent the Day with me as a Village Farmer on Women’s Day

Steem greetings @everyone and welcome to my blog as I share my experience in the village as a farmer. This is the harvesting season in my village and also time to prepare the farms to plant maize, beans, cocoyams, potatoes, etc. In general, our planting season starts as the first rain of the year starts falling.

^{At the farm harvesting potatoes.}

It was a weekend and women’s day celebration in my city and doubled as a public holiday. I took the opportunity to travel to the village to harvest the potatoes and also prepare the land for planting maize, beans and cocoyams.

Movement to my village is very stressful due to bad roads. My village is one of those villages in the North West region of Cameroon that has been hit hard by the current Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. It is one of the strongholds of the separatist fighters despite the presence of the state military men.

I took off from town on Friday evening after work booked a cab to the tollgate and took a bike to the village. I spent the night and woke up early in the morning ready to go to the farm. I took breakfast and put on my farm boots and zoomed off to the farm.

^{Ready to take off to the farm.}

I had hired a group of boys in the village who were supposed to help in the harvesting and carrying of the potatoes to the roadside where bikes can carry to the tollgate to be sold in Douala and Yaounde and even to Gabon and Central African Republic.

One of the challenges farmers face in the village is poor farm-to-market roads. Farmers have to carry their produce on their heads or if the farm has an accessible road by bike, they pay bike riders to carry their produce. Unfortunately for me, the farm did not have any accessible roads for bikes but rather had a footpath.

^{Selection process of the Potatoes.}

After harvesting, we now proceeded to select the potatoes. We had to select the potatoes to separate the seedlings from the larger ones. I had to keep the seedlings and spray them with some insecticides to preserve them from being damaged.

Then we had to carry all the selected potatoes to the roadside where the buyer had to select again before putting them into the bags for transportation to other cities and countries for consumption.

After the buyer had put them in bags, she had to hire bike riders who had to transport the potatoes to the tollgate for them to be loaded into larger trucks to other cities and countries.

It was a stressful day at the farm the whole day. I spent my own Women’s Day celebration at the farm. In the evening hours, I had to prepare a delicacy for everyone who was at the farm and also served myself a plate of food.

^{My evening meal.}

With the present hike in prices of basic foodstuffs in my area, it is good for everyone to at least get a farm and farm some of the basic foodstuffs. It greatly helps to cut down family expenditure as we often buy at the market at very exorbitant prices.

The harvest was bountiful and I was satisfied though it was so stressful but with time, I'm sure I will be able to do better.