You can’t farm via phone and succeed

Due to the various reports indicating that agriculture is one of the sectors that one can invest in to earn extra income, many people, mainly corporate employees who have fulltime jobs outside the agricultural sector have chosen to invest their little savings into farming.
Unfortunately, many of them enter this space without studying it well.  They begin “farming on phone” where they base in their offices which are usually found in cities and then begin sending instructions and lots of money to the farm caretakers. It is always until they make a visit to the farm that they discover a very big mismatch between what the caretakers were reporting on phone viz-a-viz the reality on ground. Unfortunately by the time many of them realise this, lots of millions of shillings could have been lost. 
Before choosing to invest in any form of agricultural activity or venture, one must ensure that they have studied it well enough. 
Another very crucial fact that needs to be appreciated is that agricultural productivity unlike many other ventures, is very unpredictable since it is influenced by numerous variables namely weather, topography, seed quality, crop variety or livestock breed, biotic constraints like pests and diseases, quantity and seasonal distribution of water and numerous soil properties like pH, fertility, texture, structure, among others. It is thus very important for the person contemplating about investing in agriculture to have all these in mind.
Here are some of the tips if you are considering putting your hard-earned cash into farming :
•   Identify a market gap that needs to be fixed by a farming venture or enterprise and select the appropriate enterprise that will fix the gap. Don’t just go into a farming venture just because everyone is doing it. If you want to gain from your produce, there needs to be market for it.
•   Find out exactly what the market needs in terms of variety or breed, quality, grade, moisture content, among others such that you come up with the exact products that the market will be interested in. Many people begin production, invest a lot of money only to harvest produce whose quality doesn’t match the market demands. 
•  Find out all that you need to know about that farming enterprise. There are various online materials that have been documented over the years by research organisations, government agencies, private companies and NGOs about the dos and don’ts when taking on different farming enterprises .
•  Identify at least one seminar about the enterprise you want to invest in and attend it. Agricultural shows such as Seeds of Gold Farm Clinic, Source of the Nile Expo, among others are some of the platforms where you can learn a lot from experts.
•  Identify someone who is already involved in the enterprise and seek guidance from them constantly. 
•   On top of this, seek advice from agricultural technical experts to supplement what you have gathered from the different sources. These may avail you with various alternatives based on the recent research which you may not have come across.
•   Hire the right qualified farm managers for your farm and set measures in place for tracking how they are doing the work. There is a common tendency of getting anyone found in the village where you could have bought land to act as your farm manager. This is something that needs to be avoided if you are targeting commercial farming. The right manager of your farm is very crucial if you are to benefit from the venture.
• Visit the farm as much as possible to monitor the work. Avoid assuming that work is being done. Make sure you spare sometime to inspect each and everything at the farm physically to avoid shockers.
•  Connect with potential off takers early enough to know the kind of produce or products they want such that you can then produce towards the demands of the market. This will enable you have adequate market when your crops or livestock reach the maturity stage.
With the above simple guidelines, you can be sure of benefiting from your preferred agricultural venture since you will be sure of getting returns on investment.
Mr Thomas Malunda is an agroecologist, agribusiness and Ag tech start up expert. 
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