It has been quite uneasy and there are times when people don’t really understand what you’re trying to do and nobody else has your back through your ups and downs. Even up to our first production till now, there have been ups and downs. It has not really been easy.
All those basic things that are supposed to be in place are not so you’ll have to provide some fire yourself. Another challenging part of agriculture is figuring out how to source materials, how to get farmers to do something that they’ve never done before, change their behaviour, getting our staff to do what they’ve never done before. The way we operate is different from the way even a professional farm operates.We have about 500 hectares but we are not cultivating all that.
PT: You started in 2014, there were already security challenges in the country and you definitely saw more coming. Why did you choose Nigeria, not other countries?I was already here in Nigeria before starting the company. I lived in Nigeria from 2008 to 2012 so I already knew Nigeria pretty well and I went back to the U.S.
Women are capable of doing these things. I try to make it balanced though, that it is a male dominated thing and I don’t have a lot of women on the team who are more in the labour management team and I know how hard it is to do it at all and do it in a male dominated area. PT: If the Ministry of Agriculture were to empower the industry, what recommendations would you give?Irrigation infrastructure should be one of the major things they should really invest in. Irrigation is probably the biggest challenge in tomato farming and farmers really struggle to get the resources to irrigate their tomato farms.