Agricultural Story #28

It was just a few hours before taking these photos, the cassava lying on the ground had been pulled from the soil, firm, fresh and still wearing the dust of the earth that technically raised it.

From the photos you would realize that it hadn’t been washed or peeled yet. This is how it looked after months of waiting, watering, and watching. Not me doing the work, it's a farm I visited in the village. Ghana is not fully as developed as America so there's quite a number of villages and one thing villages pride themselves with us farms and one thing almost any large farm in Ghana would have is casava

Cassava may not always be the flashiest crop to want to see when you visit the farm but it is one of the most faithful. What do I mean by that? It grows quietly, demanding little and when ready, it offers more than enough. One of the farmers, a veteran told me that this season was actually the easiest for him. We're in the rainy season and perhaps that helps the crops more than anything.

Many people in my community rely on it, it's a traditional dish so farmers get good profit harvesting it.

It's not just the casava itself but its ability to stretch into something useful. It becomes fufu, gari, cassava flour.

I only wanted to share the cassava photos but one thing I like using it for is gari and maybe sometime later on I'll share that too. I had quite a good time visiting the farm though. I must confess I'm not too comfortable with farm life, I'm more of a city kind of guy so it was quite an experience out of the comfort zone. I wasn't uncomfortable per say, I just felt that I'll need more getting used to, visiting the farm.

Something special about it and I realized it while staring at the cassava, how something so simple looking could carry so much weight. It doesn’t need packaging or decoration. Even on the bare ground, it speaks for itself, a crop that feeds families, fills plates and helps people push through harder days. If you're in America or Europe, I may not be too familiar with how much reliance the people have on cassava but we really do depend on it here in Ghana for so many dishes.

The spot where this cassava was dug up isn’t even a big farm, just a small patch where food grows, not for profit, but for survival and support.

The photo you're looking at is not just about cassava. It’s really about what the land gives when we take care of it. It’s about what patience and effort grow into. And it's about how, sometimes, the most powerful things in life grow underground.

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