Farmers’ Kraal with Hanks Saisai – Strategies to ensure access to formal markets
Farmers, especially small-scale farmers, often highlight the major challenge of accessing formal markets for their produce, particularly horticultural commodities. This, in turn, hinders them from expanding and sustaining their production. Accessing markets is a key milestone that can enable a farmer to sustain profitable production. However, several shortcomings that many small-scale farmers face need to... The post Farmers’ Kraal with Hanks Saisai – Strategies to ensure access to formal marke
Farmers, especially small-scale farmers, often highlight the major challenge of accessing formal markets for their produce, particularly horticultural commodities.
This, in turn, hinders them from expanding and sustaining their production.
Accessing markets is a key milestone that can enable a farmer to sustain profitable production. However, several shortcomings that many small-scale farmers face need to be addressed to access formal markets or sustain their operations.
It is essential for farmers to understand and implement a few strategies to secure formal market off-take agreements, which entail producing for a certain market on a contractual basis. Firstly, the most important step is for farmers to measure their production area.
For instance, if a farmer has an area with a length of 50m and a width of 30m, multiplying the two parameters would give a production area of 1 500 square meters available for the farmer to produce any crop of choice.
This is fundamental, as it enables farmers to estimate the plant population (the number of plants that can be grown on a given area) of the crop they intend to grow.
Consequently, this strategy can also be used to estimate the yield potential of an area. Furthermore, farmers must understand the importance of registering as producers with the Namibian Agronomic Board (NAB), the regulator of the crop sector.
