Ghanaian musician Trigmatic has revealed that the journey to being a successful producer of local rice has not been all rosy.
Speaking exclusively on Bloggers' Forum on GhanaWeb TV with Abrantepa, Trigmatic who now boasts of Koaba Rice disclosed that he failed twice in his rice farming entrepreneurship.
According to him, his first attempt, with only 4 acres of land to test how the farming process and the market, did not yield very encouraging results; he barely made any harvest at all.
"I was a bit scared, I didn't understand how it will work... My friend called Richard started introducing me to value creation for the crops...I got interested and said I want you to start with 4 acres and see if it will work. I failed woefully and the first time, it was bad. I didn't make any harvest, I didn't make any harvest at all. I went back to the land, called the farm manager and sometimes he will give you stories," he told GhanaWeb.
Though he almost gave up on the decision to go into rice farming, his friend who has in-depth knowledge in Agriculture encouraged him to work at it again, that also didn't produce any better results.
"I almost gave up. Then he called me again and told me to try it again. He has lots of expertise in Agric. We started with the Shama again, even that, we failed again. The harvest was bad," he said.
Taking the host and his guests - Nenebi and Vida Adutwumwaa - on how birds make the work of rice farmers difficult, the 'Mifri Ghana' hitmaker educated that, the birds which are tiny in form feed on the rice at the riping stage of the production; this he adds, affects the harvesting for the market.
"The thing with rice is that, when it ripes, it becomes milky in the husk and birds eat it. So you are there thinking, you are about to hit big harvest and the birds start coming in. They are tiny birds, they are not birds that you can kill."
Other challenges he faced included the distance of the farm, the capital invested in the farm and the minimal knowledge he had about the whole rice farm production.
Watch the interview below from the 20th minute:
