• A TOBACCO farmer attending his crops.

By MIRIAM ZIMBA –
UNLIKE some of his compatriots who engage in negative vices due to lack of formal employment, 30-year-old Mbuyu Tamboka is making it big in the agriculture sector.
He is based on the outskirts of Kaoma District and has a three hectare portion of land which he is putting to good use.
Mr Tamboka is one of the 3,000 tobacco out-grower farmers who are benefiting from the partnership between local people and the Japan Tobacco International (JTI).
Mr Tamboka, who is a father of two, was able to raise a total of K27,800 from tobacco sales to JTI in the 2015 farming season.
Like most farmers in the country, he previously concentrated all his efforts in the production of maize as a cash crop.
Over the years, he has experienced dwindling profits realised from maize sales owing to maize marketing dynamics.
From the profits raised from the sales of his tobacco to JTI, Mr Tamboka is now able to sponsor his extended family members to school while also securing an improved lifestyle for his wife, children and the extended family.
“From the money I realised from the sales of tobacco, I was able to buy some chickens, a solar panel, mattresses and other household goods,” he explains.
He also employs three seasonal workers who assist him with the labour requirements on in his tobacco plantation.
Mr Tamboka is one of the farmers who has embraced the new tobacco processing technology by JTI, known as the Matope Barn (a conventional barn used for drying [curing] the green tobacco leaf when harvested, into dry leaves which can later be processed into cigarettes).
Unlike the traditional barn, otherwise referred to as the Paper Pots which demands the use of more wooden logs for the curing process, the Matope Barn is more energy efficient because it utilises less logs.
Because of this technology Mr Tamboka, who is growing tobacco for the second year running, is this year projecting to raise K45,000 from the sales of tobacco.
“I am expecting to make not less than K45,000 this year because I have learnt from my previous experience as a novice tobacco farmer, and now I know how to grow my crop to the required standard by JTI,” he explains.
Based on lessons learned from his previous experience, Mr Tamboka has intentions of constructing two more Matope Barns, to enhance the quality of tobacco he sells to JTI as a measure to increase his profit margins.
“I hope to be able to raise enough resources to enable me purchase a hammer mill, a motor cycle and some livestock  like cows and goats,” he said.
He explains that JTI provided him with the technical advice on how to construct the Matope Barn. JTI also provided him with the materials such as cement and roofing sheets, a thermometer and a scale, among other materials, for use in his Matope Barn which he now considers a model for his future barns.
In his experience, the traditional Paper Pot barn consumes about 2,000 kilogrammes of logs for the curing process, while the matope barn only requires less than 1,200 kilogrammes.
Not too far from Mr Tamboka’s tobacco plantation is a plantation owned by Freda Nosiku who is also a farmer in Kaoma District.
Ms Nosiku, 40, is a single mother of six children who was able to raise K17,500 from the sales of tobacco from her one hectare portion of land in the 2015 agriculture season.
With the monies raised, she was able to secure improved livelihoods for her household and she is now able to meet the educational expenses for her children.
In the next farming season, Ms Nosiku is hopeful of raising at least K30,000, because like Mr Tamboka, she too has been able to learn from her previous experience as a novice tobacco farmer.
Ms Nosiku employs two labourers whom she pays on contractual basis.
She has plans to increase her hectarage in the next farming season to at least 1.5 hectares which she will solely dedicate to the tobacco cultivation.
Ms Nosiku  has one Matope Barn for curing her tobacco, and has one traditional barn which she wants to get rid of in preference for the conventional one which assures her of improved quality of tobacco.
True to the advantages the Matope Barn has over the traditional one, JTI agro-forestry supervisor Moncktan Soko explains that the Matope Barn is not only energy efficient.
Mr Soko explains that the Matope Barn concept was introduced in 2015, alongside a tree planting project to replenish the stocks of trees being cut down from the natural vegetation for use in the curing process of tobacco.
He further explains that the Matope Barn, which was initially a pilot project for tobacco farmers in Kaoma, is now being rolled out.
He said in the next farming season, all farmers wishing to supply tobacco to JTI will have to make use of the Matope Barn.
“Now we are telling our farmers who wish to grow tobacco with us in the next farming season that the Matope Barn is now a prerequisite.
“We have tested it and it has been proven to be very effective in the curing process of tobacco, meaning that even the quality of the tobacco produced from there is of a higher grade than that which is produced from the traditional barn,” he said.
This is because traditional barns do not have the mechanism to regulate the amount of heat used in the curing process, while the Matope Barn provides leverage to increase or reduce temperatures as the process necessitates, thereby ensuring uniformity in the curing process.
JTI has leaf production technicians who are available to help the farmers grow the crop to meet the minimum required standards.
“The tobacco that we buy has to meet a certain standard, which can only be achieved if farmers are regularly visited by the extension officers, and if they heed to what they are taught on how to grow the crop correctly,” Mr Soko explains.
In 2015, JTI had set a target to buy about 4 million tons of tobacco from Kaoma, and managed to purchase 3.9 million tons.
“We missed our target by a slight margin owing to unfavourable weather conditions. Besides that, we had a few issues on the marketing side mainly from competitors and briefcase buyers,” he said.
JTI’s long-term projection is that the company is in the country to stay, hence their massive investment in the infrastructure housing through construction of the Rosewood offices, among other buildings owned by JTI.
JTI is highly impressed with the quality of tobacco produced by farmers from Kaoma in the 2015/2016 farming season.
Quality is very critical for JTI because the quality of cigarettes the company produces is highly dependent on the quality of tobacco it is supplied with.
The outgrower tobacco farmers in Kaoma are not only empowered with the knowledge on how to grow a high quality tobacco crop, but also knowledge of how to add value to the crop.
This is because JTI does not buy the raw crop from farmers, but buys already processed (cured) tobacco which earns the farmers far much more than they could earn if they just sold the raw product.
Bearing in mind the environmental impact the curing process of tobacco has, JTI has put in place measures to ensure that each farmer is supplied with a minimum of 500 trees for every hectare of land used for growing the cash crop.
“Each farmer is supplied with 500 trees and they are expected to have a woodlot which grows for a period of five years before reaching maturity for it to be used in the curing process of tobacco.
“The Matope knowledge imparted about the construction and use of the Matope Barn goes alongside the planting of trees in order to ensure less negative environmental impact, and ensure that the use of the barn is also environmentally sustainable,” he said.
He said the company’s expectation is that in about five years’ time, the tobacco farmers will not have to depend on the natural vegetation in the forests around their farms for the curing of tobacco, but will instead rely on trees from their own woodlots,” Mr Soko said.
The tobacco industry is a quality driven business that has the ability to earn farmers between $2 to US$4 per kilogramme, depending on the quality of tobacco produced.
This is a business in which the early-bird-catches-the-worm concept is very applicable, because farmers who embrace the Matope Barn technology earlier than others have been able to reap the maximum income from their sales.
The tobacco industry also has a positive impact on the labour market because it offers employment opportunities to unemployed people in the rural areas.
At each stage of the crop production, the amount of work required during planting, weeding, harvesting and curing will dictate how much extra labour is required at a particular time.
JTI came into existence in Western Province in 2011 and has recorded numerous successes with the tobacco out-growers, many of whom began with almost nothing and today are fast moving on from being small-scale to medium scale agriculture entrepreneurs.
Although their core business interest is purely tobacco, JTI also offers the farmers maize inputs enough to cover one hectare as a measure to improve food security among their out-growers.
The farmers are at liberty to decide whether to use the maize for their consumption or sale it as a business venture.
Zambia has been very maize centric as regards agriculture productivity, but the tobacco industry is providing Zambians the avenue to diversify the agriculture activities, into crops like tobacco, which is fast becoming the next gold that grows.
This grading is important because leaves from many different sources may be blended to create a particular tobacco brand.
As with grapes used in wine making, while the quality and characteristics can vary with each harvest, consumers demand consistency of taste, colour and bouquet.
In fact, it can be argued that the tobacco producer’s role can even be more challenging as, unlike wine, consumers do not expect or want any variance from year to year.
For now, and probably for many years to come, JTI has won the hearts of those engaged agriculture production in Kaoma, while tobacco is being viewed as ‘the gold that grows’.