From living on a trading floor to living off the land
As some of you may be aware, in the not-too-distant past, I embarked on an agricultural “venture” with a group of like-minded and equally ignorant colleagues. Success is often lauded, but nothing gets a laugh better than the jolting, multiple failures one is greeted by on an unpredictable path of oversized ego-bashing-humble-pie-feeding insanity. Read on and laugh away!
Part 1 of an on-going series….
A massive, spine-tingling, emotion-fused and almost
desperate scream down the phone: “ If you don’t get on top of this immediately I am going to fly out there
and stick my FIST so far up your…*&!X (children were nearby)….you’ll be
biting down on my knuckles every time you chew!”
How about a supposedly placid farmer having a word with
his foreman…yep..Welcome to the age of BARMERING around. From banking to
farming…we get BARMERING.
From “buy 1,000 contracts at a limit of 15”..to…”Quick,
calculate the necessary amount of ammonium nitrate required to achieve our
desired yield per tonne”. From the Bloomberg keyboard to the Krone baler - the
world’s worst by the way and a whiney old-maid of a machine, prone to breaking
down at the merest thought of work. The farming world had been infiltrated by
a bunch of newly impoverished and hugely mislead ex-investment bankers - only one side would survive unscathed.
A bit of background is probably necessary at this juncture. Anyone that recalls the subtle effects bankers’ actions
brought to the world of mortgages (subtle – yeah right!) will surely be hiding
their eyes behind their trembling hands wondering, waiting, and worrying what
on earth these investment bankers managed to screw up this time? – and in one
of the world’s most important (and previously simple) industries – agriculture!
This is the beginning of a story of one team’s desire to
pull away from the morally inept and hated industry of the financial world, to
move to something wholly more ethical and well-looked upon and respected - the
farming world.
Sounds so nice and easy doesn’t it? Hmmm..not quite. The
following is based on a true story, with some admittedly exaggerated moments of
stupidity, to enhance the levity of the situation and prevent the writer from
re-lapsing into a period of despair and depression. As with most (fictional)
stories, the promise of a happy-ending is what keeps us reading.
Please join me as I therapeutically take you on a ride of
unimaginable idiocy and optimism…
5am, Karachi, Pakistan – February
2010
The sun rises across a truly barren
and eerily beautiful landscape. A couple of large cows graze quietly on the
green grass as the hens begin to croak and awaken the remaining flocks. We
drive in noisily on a land cruiser packed with excited and ignorant
city-dwellers – for some, the first time they have ever visited such
agricultural lands. More used to the restaurants and bars of the world’s most
celebrated urban dwellings rather than the smells and sights of nature’s own
breeding grounds. “Fish out of water” doesn’t even begin to accurately express the absurd appearance of the group.
The stinging, stinking, smell of effluence
hits your straight out. It is intense, unrelenting and forces you to get used
to it. There is no choice but to breaaaaathe it in with every gulp of air. Either
you put up with it or…well..you don’t breathe – simple.
We walk through and around our
“fields”. The fruits of labour of 9 months of hard work from the team assembled
on the farmland to carry-out the work funded and worryingly invested by four
financial-industry-types looking for a new career direction. Hopes pinned on
this farm acting as the beginning of their “agricultural empire”…haha..believe
me, at the time, it didn’t sound as funny to us at it just read to you now.
It was 2009 – the aftermath of the
financial crisis was in full-swing. The hatred towards the instigators and
perpetrators played over and over again across the world’s oh-so-puritanical
media. Job losses and austerity the repeating and fashionable themes.
Re-possessions and bankruptcies the seeming norm for the have-nots. Champagne-lunches
and caviar-laced amuse-bouches the consistent norm for the super-rich. Income
disparity commencing its, still-on-going, widening. Dissent and anger at the tailors-of-doom
of the crisis at its highest, with occupy Wall-Street and other mass protests
beginning to gather pace.
What better way for a bunch of
bankers to rid ourselves of feelings of emptiness and ridicule than to delve
into the most basic and required of occupations? – farming. Dealing with the
land. God’s land. Nature. Growth and replenishment. Nourishing millions and
assisting the livelihoods of the many. Brilliant! Rather than living off
other’s entrepreneurial flair and wealth creation, destroying long-built
savings with evil-innovations of mathematical trickery, we would revert to the
most basic and ethical of professions. What could possibly go wrong?
Abu Dhabi , a comfortable villa in a
quiet neighbourhood - January 2010
The four self-proclaimed “hAy-Team”
members (geddit?) sit around a meeting table discussing the move from banking
to farming. For this purpose, they are relying on the skills and experience of
an Abu Dhabi farmer, Falah we shall call him. We all sat patiently around the
table listening to the impressive array of machinery and equipment that would
be required to run the farm. It seemed like something out of a movie – so close
to reality and the wonder of nature, and so in the hands of God. We prepare the
land, we seed the land, we plant and nurture and then we sit back and wait for
the glorious reward. Where was the catch??
We all trusted Falah-the-farmer. He
seemed to know what to do. Not only make us a viable farm to supply animal feed
to the UAE, but to send us on our way to honest hard-earned riches. Not those
easy riches that the likes of Mitt Romney and others pay only 13.9% tax on. No
carried interest here. Nooooo. Simply blood, sweat and tears to etch out of the
fertile land that was placed before us.
Why Pakistan? Easy. Again…Just like
we viewed everything in farming to be, we assumed it would all be so straightforward.
Pakistan is close to the UAE (2 days transportation by barge), has great
fertile ground, cheap labour and with a correctly associated military general
here or there, security. What was the reality? With everything in life..you get
what you pay for. We paid very little. We got very little.
The headache started on Day 1. We
didn’t realise the extent the land would need to be flattened and removed of
rocks and other intrusive natural elements. We spent hours and hours on the phone,
shouting at people that didn’t actually understand a word we were saying
anyway. We may as well have been gesturing wildly on a silent Skype
conversation. They must have thought we were mad. We thought they were mad. We
tried to buy a tractor, it took four weeks just to arrange the purchase of a
second-hand rust-bucket that honestly refused to work on any day ending in “y’”. What were we to do?
Four investment-banking minds
ingeniously voted to bring in a trusted on-the-ground overseer. Easy enough to
select a competent individual happy enough to sit on a farm for days-on-end surrounded
by nothing but filth and more filth, right? Nope. Cue the endless discussions
centred on the right type of fit. Would they kill him for being white and out
of envy for showering every day? Would they kill him for being the wrong religion?
Would they kill him….woah…was I hearing things correctly? The discussion was
not “would they carry out his orders” but whether he would “survive” the first
week of his new exciting employment with his internal organs INTACT! What had
we gotten ourselves into!?
It was probably at this point we
should have taken a moment to pause and ponder the situation we had found
ourselves in. Let’s call it a “Wonder Years” moment – where Kevin has a pure
objective ethereal perspective on his immediate life experiences, calmly
commentating on the various lessons and life-affirming developments he is
presently witnessing. If only we had sweetly deduced right there and then, that
we had embarked upon a far more dangerous and volatile venture than we could
handle – plenty of white hairs and sleepless nights would have been avoided. Shame
real-life doesn’t mimic classic TV shows!
To be continued….
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