The diary game || To each his own|| Preparation for 2026 harvest begins|| 18th December 2025

The last month of the year. - To some it’s the time to unwind, relax, visit family and generally slow down pace for the year, but this is the beginning of the planting season for farmers. What do I mean?

• Are crops planted in December and if yes, won’t they die off due to heat???

The scorching sun, heat and high level humidity is the perfect condition needed to turn wet, sloppy animal dung into rock hard useable organic fertilizer for their farms, so medium and large scale farmers do not joke withhold this season.

Today, we have one such farmer middleman coming over to inspect and buy some chicken manure. We have some already heaped manure that’s waiting for sale, but why not add to the number, so we head into the pens to clean out chicken poop.

My brother scraping out the pens.

Mum had asked my brother to do this some days ago but he kept dilly dallying. Anyways, he’s done scraping the floors but won’t be able to pack them into bags as he has an important job to go for. This is where I come in.

Preparing to bag them into sacks.

I need to be done with this as soon as possible because there are two more pens that need attention. One has been scraped, all that’s left is packing while I need to scrape the other. This has to all be done and stacked before the buyer gets here.
One thing I’ve learnt about chicken is that they love to stay in a clean environment yet don’t know how to keep an environment clean. Wonder much.
You can see how they’re relaxing and spreading their legs out because we’ve cleaned out their dung.

Greatful birds.

While still working, the buyer arrives with his boys. Mum speaks to him and they bargain, finally settling for a price for each bag of chicken poop. Ideally, if the bag is big and full, and there’s more poop than sawdust, they pay more.

Laoding the manure into a vehicle.

They take most of the manure but leave some which they deem not fit, saying it has stayed too long and has turned to sand, their customers won’t like to buy those.
Transactions are done and they take their leave.

The next step on their agenda is to go sun dry the manure until it is dry and can be crushed into powder or sand form. For this they rely on the heavy and dry harmattan season in my country.
Preparation they say is the mother of results, and in as much as it’s the Yuletide season, it’s also time to prepare for the next batch of harvest they expect in the new year.

We all I believe can take a lesson or two from that!!
Did I fail to mention; we have a batch of birds ready for sale!