Why More Yield Doesn't Always Mean More Money

Three years ago, cassava was like gold. Farmers across the south planted every spare hectare they could find, hauled truckload after truckload to the market, and watched buyers compete for it. Last year, the same crop, grown with the same effort, on the same soil, brought home a fraction of the money. Nothing about the plant had changed, but everything about the market had.

Working harder and investing more only to earn less is the main problem most Nigerian farmers can’t understand lately. Since harvests can’t predict market revenues, farmers are forced to ask more questions about market changes and sustainable business practices.

These questions are what shaped a recent in-house session hosted by UTALIA, and the answers and insights shared are what every farmer, agripreneur, and agriculture student in Nigeria needs to sit with.

A Platform Built for Africa's Agripreneurs

UTALIA, which stands for Understanding the Agribusiness Landscape in Africa, is an initiative of the Africa Integrative Agriculture Network (AIAN) built to help aspiring and existing agripreneurs make sense of the opportunities scattered across Africa's agricultural value chain, from production and processing to distribution, export, and financing.

It runs quarterly practical, expert-led conversations, pairing people who are actively building agribusinesses with those still trying to find their footing. It is deliberately designed to be informal and conversational; speakers provide live answers to real questions.

Rethinking What Production Success Looks Like

One particular session, held at the end of June 2026, leaned into a theme that cuts across every corner of Nigerian agriculture: the gap between producing more and earning more. One of the speakers, Joseph Fashola, an agribusiness data and technology specialist, opened with a warning dressed up as a compliment. Farmers who double their output, he said, often assume they've doubled their fortunes, forgetting that the market may not absorb that extra volume at a price worth the effort.

He explained this with the popular cassava story and the quieter but more common version in agribusiness: a poultry farmer who moves from 8,000 birds to 10,000, feels the pride of growth, but never runs the numbers to see whether the extra 2,000 birds actually improved the margin or simply flooded a market that couldn't absorb them at the old price. "Increasing yield alone does not maximise value," he told the group.

Alongside Joseph was Alfred Ukan, an agripreneur and business strategist who has built and advised farm ventures across the poultry and produce space. Where Joseph spoke in frameworks and data, Alfred spoke in stories, the kind that stick because they involve real people, real losses, and real recoveries. Together, their conversation moved well beyond a single webinar's worth of tips into something closer to a working manual for anyone serious about agribusiness in Nigeria.

The Five Pillars to Turn Farms Into Businesses

Joseph organised his half of the session around what he called the five pillars of higher productivity: inputs, knowledge, technology, markets, and data. Each one, he argued, has to be deliberately built, not assumed.

On inputs, his advice was blunt: stop buying the cheapest seed, breeding stock, or feed you can find and start buying the best you can verify. He compared depleted soil to a person wearing the same clothes for twenty years, a small but vivid image for a real problem: land that has been farmed continuously without rest or replenishment cannot keep producing at the same standard, no matter how much fertiliser gets thrown at it.

Knowledge, he said, delivers the highest return of any agricultural input. He drew a sharp line between farmers who still practice only rainy-season farming out of habit and those who have learned enough, through extension services, record-keeping, financial literacy, and Good Agricultural Practices, to farm all year round, producing roughly five times the output, income, and profit of their peers doing the same work with less know-how.

On technology, Joseph pushed back against a fear he hears constantly in rural Nigeria: that machines and artificial intelligence are coming to replace farmers. He answered that a tool without an operator who understands the work is just an expensive ornament. He described building an advisory system that studies rainfall patterns region by region to guide planting decisions, and a price intelligence tool that tracks agricultural commodity prices across all six geopolitical zones, which he said his team has shared with a close-knit community of 60 agribusinesses with roughly 95 per cent daily accuracy. The point, as he put it, isn't to replace the farmer's judgment but to arm it, the same logic behind using tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to think through a specific problem on your own farm, once you give them enough context to work with.

Markets came next, and here Joseph delivered the line that shaped the rest of the session: don't farm first. Generation after generation, he said, farmers have planted first and gone looking for buyers afterwards, then blamed government policy or bad luck when the harvest sat unsold or sold cheap. He flipped the sequence: identify who will buy the product, at what price, under what quality standard, and only then produce to meet that demand.

The fifth pillar, data, is what makes the other four defensible to a buyer. Premium markets, export buyers, processors, and formal retailers don't just want a product; they want proof. Who grew it, under what conditions, with what inputs, and tested against what standards? Joseph's team built a digital traceability platform, which he called the Digital Trust and Trade Infrastructure for African supply chains, to let producers aggregate that information in one place and hand a buyer a verifiable history with a single click. Data, in his words, "has become an agricultural infrastructure" in its own right, not a bureaucratic afterthought.

Sell First, Farm Later

If there was one instruction the panel wanted every listener to leave with, it was this: engage the market before you plant, not after. Alfred put real weight behind the idea with his own account of pitching to one of the largest chicken suppliers in Edo State. He didn't even have live birds ready. He bought samples from a supermarket, packaged them, and used them to open a conversation about volume, price, and standards. That conversation, not the product itself, was what taught him what the buyer actually wanted, and what it would take to supply at that scale.

The advice held even for a young caller named Anna, who told the panel she planned to start broiler farming the following month simply because she had three idle months before returning to school. Joseph's response cut straight through the plan: she hadn't spoken to a single buyer yet, and had no idea which breed or size the market around her actually preferred. Alfred's follow-up turned the problem into a starting point instead of a dead end: go sell birds for an established broiler farmer first. That single move builds a distribution network and a customer list before a single naira goes into feed, so that by the time Anna raises her own birds, she already knows exactly who's buying.

Another caller, James, offered proof that the strategy works. Before starting an egg business, he spent close to four months working, unpaid, inside another trader's shop, learning the customers, their preferences, and the rhythm of the market, before risking a single naira of his own capital. "If you have any experience," he told the group, "you are not going to fail." It's advice with a long history in every value chain, and one that Good Agricultural Practices guides rarely spell out as plainly as a caller on a webinar just did.

Why Business Skill Beats Technical Mastery

Another agribusiness success secret shared in the session is a controversial one. The speaker said business skills beat technical mastery in achieving success.

Alfred argued that success in agribusiness rests on two legs, technical skill and business skill, and that too many farmers chase mastery of the first while neglecting the second almost entirely. He opined that most farm failures in Nigeria are leadership failures dressed up as technical ones. 

An agripreneur, in his framing, needs roughly 70 per cent business competence and the humility to bring in expertise for the rest. Neither Aliko Dangote nor Femi Otedola, he pointed out, built their fortunes by personally mastering oil refining or banking. They built them by mastering partnership, structure, and the discipline to hire people who understood the technical detail better than they ever would. 

He illustrated the idea with the poultry business cycle: day-old chick prices dip through the rainy months, climb steadily toward Christmas, dip briefly right before the holiday, then rise again through January and February. Farmers who understand that rhythm buy when prices are low and sell during the peaks. Farmers who don't end up on the wrong side of it every single year, and often blame the market for a pattern the market announces well in advance to anyone paying attention.

Building a Farm to Run Without You

Operational discipline was the other pillar Alfred pushed hard on, framing every breakdown on a farm as a leadership problem rather than a workforce problem. 

His fix was refreshingly low-tech: clear, individually owned weekly responsibilities instead of vague daily errands, and a simple WhatsApp reporting system where workers post short videos and photos of completed tasks, tagging supervisors the way an email thread tags stakeholders. Everyone can see what's been done, nothing gets lost in he-said-she-said, and a standard reporting template- mortality counts, feed usage, weight checks- replaces guesswork with a paper trail anyone can audit.

It's not a glamorous system, but it's one any smallholder can start tomorrow without spending a naira on new software, and it addresses one of the quieter reasons farm productivity stalls in Nigeria: not a lack of effort, but a lack of structure around the effort already being made.

Turning Connections Into Capital

The speakers spent a good time discussing how to grow a business without the capital to hire a full team or fund every deal outright, a problem that rarely gets airtime in farming conversations. 

Alfred pointed listeners toward government-backed placement schemes, internship arrangements with university departments, NYSC postings, and programmes like the Nigeria Jubilee Fellows scheme that bring in capable young talent at little or no direct cost to a small farm, since a third party often covers the stipend. 

Joseph offered a parallel model for anyone trying to broker deals bigger than their own bank account allows. Build a simple one-pager outlining the opportunity, the capital required, and the risks involved, and take it to potential financing partners rather than walking away from a deal that's simply too large to fund alone. It reframes financing not as a wall but as a conversation, built on the same market-first discipline the whole session kept circling back to.

Solving Nigeria's Surplus Problem

The most pointed question of the session came from a listener who does agricultural extension work and sees the paradox up close: Nigeria produces yam, cocoyam, cassava, shea butter, and cowpeas in genuine abundance, yet the farmers growing them rarely see that abundance reflected in their income. 

Alfred's answer reframed the frustration as an opportunity. He cited a report suggesting Nigeria's real shortfall isn't production capacity but processing and industrialisation capacity, and argued that the people most frustrated by the imbalance are also best positioned to fix it, by aggregating surplus produce and moving it toward the regions and export markets that lack it. Catfish, plentiful in the south, sells well up north; oil palm, common in the south, is scarce in Abuja; tomatoes grown in bulk elsewhere regularly move by the truckload into Delta, where local supply can't keep up. 

Aggregation and logistics, in other words, aren't side businesses; in a market this uneven, they're often the most direct path to income.