Hello everyone, sorry I have been kind of busy lately because it's harvesting season. We have to move with speed otherwise we incur a substantial loss if our produce rots.
After harvesting maize, we have to dry it well. Luckily, I recently bought my mum this long tarp for grain drying. It's waterproof as well so we don't have to toil taking out the maize in cobs and into the store in case it rains.
Most of the time, that's how my mum threshes her maize. She spends nights threshing it manually after everyone is asleep. Otherwise we thresh it together in the afternoons, after farm work. I have been looking for people with threshing machines and I found one guy about 10 kilometers away. He charges $1.20 per sack of grains.
Today, we threshed 5 sacks in total. 2 sacks will sustain our family until next season. We will sell the three remaining sacks plus maybe 3 sacks that we haven't harvested. It would have taken our family of 6 about 4-5 hours to thresh one sack of maize. By the time we are done, most of the maize would have rotten. The rotten maize will be for preparing busaa (a local brew- porridge like, I have a video preparing busaa, you'll see it soon) but especially we will crush it and feed our cattle with it. We don't know what aflatoxins are..or rather we don't care!
We did the work hurriedly and I am heading to Nairobi by bus tonight, then my flight to Cape Town is tomorrow morning. I prepared some chilli powder (super hot) for a friend in Cape. I hope the airport doesn't take it away from me, fingers crossed!
Fossil Fuels for Africa.
