My father is a school teacher, he is also a farmer, he has a farm where he grows a variety of farm crop ranging from cassava, yam, maize and cocoyam. Anytime I am home, he sometimes asks me to help out on the farm, so I know a bit about these crops and their cultivation.
Each of them has different modes of cultivation/propagation, different duration of growth, and they require different kinds of care and attention too. Cassava for example is propagated by the stem, it grows for about two or three years before it matures, and it requires little or no care, just plant it and come back in three years. Maize, on the other hand, is propagated by seed, grows within 3–6 months, requires a bit of care within that short time; mostly weeding, and if the conditions are right, you will be harvesting in the space of three months. But you see yam, that yam tuber, my father calls it the princess of farm crop because it requires a lot of care and pampering, the cultivation involves a long list of tasking and demanding processes from planting to harvesting.
The yam season in Ekiti, where my father’s farm is located, starts around September, October. First, you have to get virgin farmland that hasn’t been used for at least five planting seasons, clear it of the bushes and whatever debris you find there, then you can proceed to make big heaps(if you make small ones, you will get small yams), after making those heaps, planting starts; with yam seedlings.
Early planting of yam seedlings usually begins around November or December, when the dry season is in full swing. While late planting coincides with the onset of the rain around April.
When the rain commences, and yam vines start sprouting, you need to mulch; mulching is a process where you cover the yam heaps with scrubs and foliage to prevent the soil from losing moisture and also to keep the soil temperature at low levels, it doesn’t sound like much until you realise you have to manually mulch a farm with more than 500 yam heaps and when yam vines start becoming longer, you have to stake with them sticks so that the wines and the leaves can get enough sunlight; Long yam vines are weak and will fall to the floor if you don’t support them with sticks, after staking, you have to continue with general weeding until like June, July when the yam is finally ready for harvesting, this is when most towns celebrate their new year festival. My father will always say “Yam farming isn’t for the weak or lazy”.
Sometimes, you might do all of this and things will not still go according to plan. Such was the case of one yam season when I was still a little kid, My father had done all the necessary stuff, he had cleared his land, sorted his best yam seedling and had planted them, he was pretty much done with everything he had to as regards early planting, all he was waiting for, was the rain; the rain sets the stage for the next process of yam farming, but that year, the rain didn’t come, all through February and March, there was not a single raindrop.
Although my father tried to put up a strong face and to act as if he wasn’t bothered about the rain, you could still see the desire, longing and wanting for rain written all over him, he wanted the rain so that his work will not be in vain, he waited, we waited, but the rain didn’t come. Anytime I accompanied it to the farm that period, it was always some talk about how badly the yams were going to do that year or how if the rain could come now, things could still be salvaged, of course, I had no response to those monologues of his, I only nodded in agreement as if I understood what he was talking about.
Then, one night, rain fell, it was a heavy one with a lot of wind, thunderstorms and lightning, as I turn in my bed that night enjoying the cold breeze from the rain, I could not help but imagine the happy look on my father’s face because he has gotten the answers to his prayers and desires, the next morning, been a school free day, my father asked me to accompany him to the farm when we got there, I had expected a happy and joyous look on his face, there was no reason to be despondent anymore, the yams in the ground aren’t going to be destroyed, the rains are here, God is praised. but to my shock, the face I saw was an indifferent one, he retained the look he had before the rain, so I asked “Daddy, rain fell yesterday, you should be happy, why the indifference”. He laughed, he picked up his hoe, struck the ground with it, and pulled away from the first layer of the soil, beneath that wet and mushy layer, was a parched and very dry ground. It was as though the rain hadn’t fallen at all, I was shocked, seeing my confusing face, my father retorted, “We need that kind of rain to fall consistently for it to properly saturate all the layers of the soil and for those yams to get the moisture they need for growth” he paused for a while before continuing, “The rain that fell yesterday is like when you poured water on the surface of a rock, it just flows away without making any penetrative effect, for us to get the results we need, that rain must keep falling”.
As a child, those words held no meaning and were of little significance, but as an adult, this story came roaring back to my memory, now with a lesson to hold on to. Of late, I have been thinking about consistency and how much we can achieve by repeatedly doing something until it saturates us and becomes a part of us.
As young adults, we all have plans to learn a new skill, pick a new hobby, start a new trade or whatsoever, but the problem I have realised with many people including myself is that we always have the initial boost and motivation to get at these things, only to run out of steam midway and we expect ourselves to achieve what we aimed to achieve initially. Like the first heavy rain that rarely penetrates the ground, our initial attempts will barely get us anywhere, it takes consistency and constant practice for us to make any headway in whatever we have chosen to learn or build, those half-hearted pushes we do at in initial stage won’t get us the result we want.
Malcolm Gladwell, a popular author in his book, The Outliers, mentioned that for humans to attain an expert level in a particular skill, you must practice that skill for at least 10,000 hours. That’s a far cry from what most of us are willing to commit to that new stuff today. Consistency is hard, the discipline it takes to achieve it is harder, but I have come to realize that, that is what it takes to achieve those goals and if we are going to have any chance at success, we must devote those long hours. The first rain doesn’t count, only the subsequent ones do. Our starting attempt, though worth celebrating, doesn’t count either, we must be willing to put in the long hours and the effort, remain consistent and be disciplined for a long time to get the result we desire.
Marvelous, this is MARVELOUS!!
The new things I learnt just now about farming, thank you so much for these little drops of rain that you give us from time to time. God bless you
Inspiring!!!