There’s a rather consistent supply of bananas and papayas now ripe for harvest every other week, if not weekly. The brinjals are a welcoming sight, though it’s a pain to get things right. There’s much to tweak about. FYI, brinjals, big chillies and lemon grass (serai) are perhaps one of the most offending crops that are frown upon due to excessive usage of pesticide and chemical fertilizers. Herbicides and serai is a marriage made in heaven (more on that in a future post).
Without a full time worker, it’s a challenge to manage cash crops which are currently ripe for harvest. There’s considerable time and effort that go into caring for the plants and harvesting them at the right time. The practice of poly cropping and mixed farming do lend itself to a certain level of “perceived inefficiencies” with regards to commercial gains in harvest size, consistency in supply and the level of harvesting difficulty. I said “perceived” because it’s a managed notion that needs to be understood in the larger context of environmental conservation.
There’s still much to be done and optimised measures are still not in place to maximise the chickens’ performance due to lack of labour.
The chickens are delivering a little more kampung chicken eggs than usual, though at an expense (something’s got to give). I forced myself to ensure the chickens get a boost in protein intake by feeding them extra BSFL from the larvarium for the past 3 weeks and it’s paying off (I got to harvest and filter the larvae). As a result, other responsibilities at the farm are taking a back seat and productivity in other areas are affected. It’s a musical chair indeed; hence the importance of ensuring an airtight system that runs smoothly with little labour.
Chillies…well, that’s another super big indescribable pain. The picking kills. As a farmer farming responsibly and experiencing all these first hand on the ground, one can easily understand why there’s a shift towards modern optimization via fertigation, standardized planting in rows, use of IoT and other efforts to reap maximum profits in the commercialisation of crops. It’s a pity that many still fail to see the negativity in such applications in favour of profits. But that’s another story to dissect next time.
