There is a precise science to planting maize. You wait for the rains, spend a small fortune on certified seed and DAP fertilizer, hire a tractor to plough the land, and break your back under the scorching sun. You do all this with the blind faith of a devout believer, trusting that in a few months, your three acres will yield a bountiful harvest.

What the character development school of farming quickly teaches you is that you are rarely farming for yourself. In Kenya, the moment you put seed into the soil, you become an unwitting philanthropist running a free, open-air buffet for every opportunistic creature in a three-kilometre radius.

Take my current three-acre maize field, for instance. In May this year, the crop had just hit the one-month mark. The shoots were tender, green, and full of promise. To be honest, it was quite a beautiful sight that ought to bring joy to any farmer’s heart. Instead, it brought me blood pressure. Why? Because my esteemed neighbour views my fence as a mere suggestion and my farm as her personal pasture. Every afternoon, like clockwork, her goats would come trooping in, roaming freely and treating my germinated maize plants like an all-you-can-eat salad bar. When confronted, the neighbour would respond with that classic, disarming rural shrug that somehow implies the goats are acting on divine mandate, completely beyond human control. It is the ultimate audacity: I pay for the inputs, she gets the fattened livestock. And just like that, a new expense emerged: buying barbed wire to reinforce some gaps in the fence that the errant goats were taking advantage of.

If you think livestock owners are the only ones perfecting the art of reaping where they never sowed, allow me to take you back to last year’s sunflower and bean harvest.

My one acre of sunflowers grew magnificently, their golden heads bowing proudly in the sun. Naturally, the local bird population took this as a personalized invitation to a grand banquet. Slowly and surely, the flocks descended. To their credit, if you can call it that, they were remarkably methodical. They wouldn’t just ruin a crop recklessly; each individual bird would pick one sunflower head, polish it clean to the last seed, and only then move on to the next.

Desperate to salvage my investment, I ended up embarking on an absurd rescue mission. I was forced to buy individual net bags and manually cover every single sunflower head across the entire acre. By the time I was done, I wasn’t just growing oilseeds, I was producing the most expensive, handcrafted, individually tailored sunflowers in the republic.

Beans are a tricky crop requiring constant weeding and vigilance. Last season, as the pods matured, we routinely walked the front section of the field near the main road, marvelling at how full the plants looked intercropped with the maize and sorghum. We patted ourselves on the back for a job well done, not to mention the nitrogen fixing benefits that the beans had added to the soil. It was only when harvest day arrived and we ventured into the deep back of the field that the horror unfolded.

Someone had been operating a highly efficient, stealthy night-shift operation. Under the cover of darkness, an anonymous “partner” had been systematically harvesting the beans, stripping the plants bare row by row, leaving just enough intact at the front so as not to raise alarm. It turns out beans aren’t just great at fixing nitrogen in the soil; in the hands of a night-shift thief, they do wonders for fixing a broken wallet.

And then, of course, there are the ground-level opportunists. To feed my sheep their protein nutritional requirements, I have planted a lush patch of lucerne. Then the local hares arrived. These aren’t ordinary rodents; they are refined, aristocratic hares with an appetite for luxury. They skip the wild weeds, bypass the local grass and head straight for the premium lucerne, nibbling away with absolute impunity.

Philosophers often speak of the law of the seed, that you must sow before you can reap. But spend a season on a Kenyan farm and you will quickly realize that this economic principle has been completely inverted. The modern ecosystem runs on a brand-new model: let the fool sweat, and we shall partake.

I will keep farming, mostly because I am too stubborn to stop. It is an expensive hobby but one that provides some economic stimulus to the rural economy through local hiring of casual labour and purchasing of inputs from shops. At least that’s what I tell myself as consolation. If you’re thinking about starting, don’t. Premium tears loading.

X: @carolmusyoka

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