4 COMMON MISTAKES EVERY BEGINNER IN BANANA FARMING MUST AVOID
Don’t make these mistakes when venturing into banana farming otherwise your farm will never yield.
Mistake No1: Buying unhealthy suckers [seeds].
A farmer should make sure that the suckers bought or acquired to setup a farm are healthy, well treated, and disease free to avoid plants diseases like pathogens, weevils and nematodes which may result into losses.
Untreated suckers or plantlets causes stunted growth, poor seed production and small size fruiting. Therefore, always get suckers from a reliable and healthy source.
Mistake No2: Acquiring infected land.
Most times when you experience poor plant performance and growth, it’s not usually caused by the suckers you purchased no matter how healthy the suckers are. If your land is infected with either nematodes or fungi, the plants will be affected too. Therefore transferring the disease to the plants and any other sucker that will be transplanted in the same farm will be infected too.
So you have to make sure you fumigate the land if you are not sure that the land isn’t contacted with diseases.
Mistake No3: Expecting to harvest 100% of your plants annually!
Like any other business, farming too needs patience. No farmer should expect 100% harvest of his banana at the same time and the same month. For your first year of harvest, you need a lot of patience as some plants might even take upto 16 months to mature and bear a fruit.
It’s therefore advisable to always take the first year of planting as the experimental and practical year of business.
Being patient, steady and focused is the key to make it big time in banana farming.
Mistake No4: Expecting maximum farm harvests minus supervision.
My village friend, a prominent banana farmer once told me this statement that the quantity and quality of your farm produce will always depend on how many footsteps the owner of a farm makes or steps in his farm. That the more the footsteps [supervision], the more the harvests!
Unfortunately many farmers take looking to visit their farm and they leave all farm decisions for their workers as they hustle at their full time jobs which leads to low outputs or losses.
