When You Farm Like Your Neighbour and Lose Like Yourself

My boss used to say, stop reinventing the wheel. But from observation, I have come to realise that in farming, you do need to invent your wheel. Farming is not a copy and paste craft. It is intimate and requires a personalised understanding. Just like no marriage is the same, you must define what works for your farm, then refine it until you perfect it.

One of the quiet traps in African agriculture is the belief that what succeeds elsewhere will succeed here. We see a system working in Australia, a grazing model thriving in the United States, a crop rotation pattern from Europe, and we assume it is a template. It rarely is.

Agriculture is not a universal formula. It is a negotiation between land, climate, soil memory, rainfall behaviour, local genetics and human discipline. When these variables change, the outcome changes. That is why a stocking rate that works in Texas can destroy pasture in Kajiado. A hay system that thrives in France can collapse on a farm in Machakos. Even fertiliser recommendations that work for your neighbour can fail in your field.

The problem is not that these methods are wrong. It is that they are not ours.

Africa has a long history of local systems that worked before they were dismissed as primitive. Pastoral movement, herd impact, bush control, water harvesting and seed selection. All of it was practical knowledge shaped by generations of trial and error. When we ignore this context, we lose the logic behind our own land.

Copying methods without interpretation creates confusion. One farmer buys a new breed because it worked in Israel, only to lose it to heat stress. Another invests in irrigation because it worked in Spain, only to realise the soil cannot retain water. Someone else buys machinery for a field that never needed it. It becomes an expensive circle of trial, error and disappointment.

At the moment, we have an influx of brokers pushing livestock that has worked in South Africa, and they are targeting wealthy Kenyans who want to upgrade their breeds. This pressure has led many farmers to take out loans to import bloodlines that promise automatic value addition. Yet, we have a farmer in Laikipia who has been improving his bloodline for forty years and now has a Boran bull gaining three kilogrammes daily on hay alone.

The real work is not imitation. It is understanding. Before adopting any foreign method, a farmer must ask a simple question: does my land behave the same way as theirs? If not, the method must be adapted, not copied. Most people lose out because they are impatient, while farming is a long game.

Africa does not lack information. It lacks interpretation.