Business
Dizengoff began
operations in Nigeria in 1958. We represent the sole importer and
distributor for the world Number one tractors and implements such as
ploughs, harrows etc. We import them and provide technical support,
warranty support, ongoing repairs.
Greenhouses
We are into a relatively new area in
Nigeria which is greenhouses with drip irrigation solutions. Greenhouse
technologies are a combination of the protective environment and all the
technologies of irrigation and chemicals. Today, Kenya is the world’s
largest supplier of cut flowers and roses. It is a $1billion export
income earner for Kenya but 30 to 35 years ago, it was not so. Our
sister company in Kenya has installed over 80 percent of all the
greenhouses in Kenya. About 350,000 people are involved in that
industry. It is a major part of the agric sector in Kenya.
We looked to use that technology
and its application for West Africa. So, about four to five years ago,
we started to see the combination of factors which suggest that bringing
that technology to Nigeria would be helpful for production of market
garden vegetables, precisely tomatoes, since all Nigerians eat tomatoes
everyday in one form or another.
Tomatoes
At least 2.5 million tons of tomatoes are
consumed every year in Nigeria. But only 1.3million to 1.4million tons
are grown yearly through the old traditional open fields methods. Half
of what is grown is even wasted before getting to the market because of
the poor infrastructure- the logistics challenge of getting farm to
fork.
Import
There is a big gap so Nigeria imports
fresh tomato pastes, tin tomatoes and even fresh tomatoes. More than
half of what the country consumes is imported, which is crazy. So, we have started to adapt this greenhouse technology for Nigeria to grow tomatoes.
Open fields versus greenhouses
By growing tomatoes in open fields
Nigeria, like other Sub-Saharan African countries will deliver yields of
no more than seven tons per hectare. Last year, we had 294 greenhouses
installed; on average they deliver 264 tons per hectare. With the
greenhouses, our growers produce tomatoes all year round, anywhere in
Nigeria. Whether in Calabar to Lagos, to Katsina, we have got our
greenhouses all over Nigeria.
Managed greenhouses
The reason they are so successful is not
just the technology, or the physical component we put together, it is
also the know-how and the supervision of that know-how every single day.
It is applying the technology in the right way every single day. So, we
supply managed greenhouses. We install them in the growers’ farms, we
bring in our own supervisors and we pay them salaries.
What we are trying to do is not just to
fill the import supply gap, we need to manage the technology so well
that the farmer can have a better income to make it attractive for them
to move from the subsistence kind of farming common in Africa to a
business. It is crazy for Nigeria to use proceeds from crude oil to
import food, in a nation where if you put a stick in the ground in any
part of the country, it would grow. There are different types of soils
in different parts of the country but they are all very fertile.
Our managed greenhouse is a turn-key
business. We have it structured in a way that it can deliver full
returns within the first year of the business. We also help them on the
supply chain for example, a lot of our growers are supplying Shoprite
and there is still need for more supplies. There is also demand from the
hospitality industry -hotels, restaurants etc. Airline companies are
also buying cherry tomatoes from our growers so what we are trying to do
is to help Nigerian growers have a sustainable agribusiness at
attractive levels of returns and profitability.
Challenges
The major challenges are to ensure that
the application of the technology is applied every single day. Plants
are like little children. If mothers do not nurture – feed, clean,
shelter their children every single day, they may fall sick and die. So
also, if you do not nurture the plant in the right way, feed it
properly, water it properly, nurture it, handle it properly, protect it
from pests and diseases or whatever, the plant would die. That is the
reason we have got our supervisors within our installations. There is no
Christmas day off or Sunday off in taking care of plants just like
little children.
Another challenge is that Nigeria like
all countries within 10 degrees of the equator has bacteria wilt virus
in the soil which attacks and damages plants. There is no acceptable
chemical treatment because this will damage the environment within the
soil, so we have to pre-treat the soil by heating it and then we
separate and put the soil in bags to grow the plants.
Continuous harvests
We use plants that keep growing and
growing. There are basically two types of plants the determinate with
very limited lifespan and the indeterminate which will live as long as
you allow them to live. Indeterminate
seed varieties will give up to 26 clusters of tomatoes if they are
nurtured in the right way. They will give bigger tomatoes and deliver
harvests of tomatoes on a consistent basis. Those
plants economically will survive eight to nine months but the normal
type of bush tomatoes that subsistent farmers grow in open fields will
last four months, give one harvest of crop and die.
So we are giving the grower something
that will constantly yield, using certain types of varieties bred for
tropical environment of which one is 500g to 600g in weight.
Growers
There are also two types of growers –
Those growing for the fresh tomatoes market and those growing for
processing. In Nigeria, we are seeing the beginning of canning plants
because a lot of women like to use canned pastes as additives to their
soups and stews.
So we talk to our growers and ask what
market segment they will be focusing on – fresh tomatoes or processed
tomatoes. We provide everything- seeds, all chemicals, all equipment,
insurance, supervision, meetings, everything. What they need to bring is
the land and the investment funds.
We choose our growers carefully. When
people come and say they want to buy green houses from us. I talk with
them and if I find out they are the get rich quick kind of person, I
will not sell to them because they will have failure and the concept and
the confidence that this can work may be damaged. My staff get stunned
that even with money on the table, I say to some people you are not the
right kind of person to be a grower.
Sustainability
What we all want
is sustainability. Nigeria is the 13th larger consumer of tomatoes in
the world and I want Nigeria to grow their own tomatoes. I do not want
them to fail at it. That was what we did when we started growing flowers
in Kenya. We told a lot of people they do not have the commitment, the
staying power.
If Nigeria can meet its own indigenous need of tomatoes, it can then start looking to meet other countries’’ needs.
Location
The closer one brings the cultivation of
the crop to where the market or consumption is, the less volatile will
be the price of tomatoes. In other words, most of the consumption in the
urban centres is mostly in the south – Lagos, Calabar, Port Harcourt,
Enugu. When too much of the indigenous tomato supply is coming from
Plateau, Katsina or Kano state, it will result in very expensive costs
from site of growing to where the market is.
My greenhouses work anywhere in Nigeria
because production is not dependent on climate since it is in a climate
controlled environment. Another big challenge is the humidity. Most
fruits like a relative drop in temperature – humidity at night. Nigeria
does not get that dramatic drop in relative humidity at night especially
in the south. Fruits and vegetables like cold nights, when there is no
sharp drop in relative humidity, the pollen is too sticky to release but
we have a unique technology which actually creates pollination
regardless of the relative humidity. It is like artificial insemination.
We introduce pollen to the plant so the
plant will move to the pollination stage. That is the reason we put
supervisors in our greenhouses to apply that technology very carefully
and they can as well do it to during the day.
Distance/time
Distance and time creates damage to the
crop. If tomatoes grown by our growers are put side by side with
imported tomatoes from South Africa on a supermarket shelf, Nigerians
would buy the Nigerian tomatoes because they are
younger. The Imported South African tomatoes are seven to 10 days
older, and would not sell besides the fresh Nigerian tomatoes. The seed
varieties used for Nigerian tomatoes within the Nigerian environment are
right for Nigeria but the South African ones are softer probably
because they have travelled for days
Brain-fed agriculture
When a plant gets too much water, it
drowns and the roots do not get developed. It does not become strong
enough to pass water through the plant. But our modern technologies
deliver the right amount of water at the right time and right place.
Every time a child is sick, if you keep
giving him medicine, he would become weak. If you want to nurture your
child to fight infection, you have make him strong, that is exactly what
you have to do with a plant. You have to feed the plant and water the
plant in a very controlled way that it would become strong and the water
has to be clean. The greenhouses stop too much rain. Bacterial wilt
virus is actually in the water table in Nigeria, not just the soil, so
we also pre-treat the water.
Clients
Our target clients are primarily the
private sector. We have some of our greenhouses in government locations
but the yields are much lower than the private sector growers due to
diversion and distraction.
Policies
There have been many schemes to improve
agriculture in Nigeria. I think the Agricultural Transformation Agenda
(ATA), making agriculture a business is a move in the right direction.
The new government can adapt it. It is essential to get government out
of the day-to-day running of agribusiness. The population is growing so
much. There is the need to feed the people and there is also the social
aspect- so many people are unemployed. The oil industry and service
industry cannot provide enough jobs. What we need to do is to get young
people to see that there is a middle class prosperity available to them
in agribusiness with the right tools, equipment and financing. That is
what they did in Kenya.
MD’s background
I first came to Nigeria in 1978 to help
set up GSK. I left in 1982, came back in 1986 to set Smithkline and
Beecham. I left and came back in 1997.
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