Beautiful new day to my family here, I hope that we had a restful night and are sound in health, fit, and able to pursue a new says dream.
Ever since we entered the month of December, harvest began fully, and we have been picking our grains from the farms. We started with rice, got a good amount of it harvested before moving to beans, and now to guinea corn.
The guinea corn harvest was on yesterday, and I can say that I didn't expect it to be as stressful as it is. I think I prefer bean harvest to sorghum harvest.
With beans harvested, we only need to bend over and harvest the grains in the pods, but with guinea corn, which are all multiple times taller than myself, I have to bend over the plant and go cut out its head. It was really energy demanding, and I soon got tired.
My dad noticed it immediately and asked me to get some rest and allow the men to do this particular work. I left them to it, and having rested for a while, I didn't feel like staying idle; instead, I headed over to a neighbor's farm to assist them with their bean harvest.
It was during the harvest that I noticed just how much of his bean crops that rodents had damaged.
Take a look at this
We have rats, mice, and any of these bush animals come to feed on the beans.
They peel the pods and eat up the seed within. You may want to argue with us that they won't eat as much of the crops since they are but little animals compared to goats and cows, but that isn't the case at all. Since the farms are often surrounded by bushes, you can have as many of these farm animals come to feed at once, and when such happens, they can reduce our harvest to half of what we are meant to take home, and this is exactly what has happened here.
As many of the beans have been eaten by rodents. In our own case, some cattle invaded our farms and ate some portions of the harvest completely, but in this case, rodents were consistently feeding on the crops since it wasn't harvested timely.
With farm work, almost everything must be done promptly. Every kind of farm activity must be done promptly to avoid these kinds of damages. We were able to plug the remaining of his beans, and I felt really bad for him. If the harvest had been done much earlier, it could have been possible to avoid this many losses.
It is really a sad thing that having grown your crops till they are ripe for harvest you start witnessing little losses here and there. While walking around the farm you will see the beans seeds these rodenst have hidden in holes and crevices.
They pick up grains from the farms and go eat them in holes some distance away. It is both actually not funny that we cannot kill these rodenst too in order to preserve the wild life. My dad had often set traps for them in the past but he is well enlightened now about the dangers and diseases associated with eating some bush meats.
In the meantime we were also able to cut some guinea corn and are preparing to beat and clean the seeds today. After the harvest and cleaning, we will then measure how much of the grains we have been able to collect.
I left the farm much earlier to attend to my brother, whose health is challenging.
The weather hasn't been friendly, and more people are coming down with flu, fever, and headaches. Hopefully he gets better and assist us with work on the farm too.
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