Masila Kanyingi
Agricultural journalists are like pulmonologists, rarely dealing with emergencies, unlike their adrenaline-fueled cousins chasing crime and politics. Our emergencies come in two flavours: wrestling with information gaps and racing global shocks. Both are guaranteed to make us sweat
like farmers in a fertilizer shortage.
This week, I got a double dose. First, a desperate call from a newsroom colleague hunting Kenya’s flower export data. After many ignored rings, I finally answered. He accused me of avoiding him; I reminded him gently, “In agriculture, we don’t do emergencies.” His lament was familiar: farmers don’t talk, government releases half-baked stats, and multinationals guard secrets tighter than statehouse files. In the end, we agricultural hacks stitch fragments of truth like patchwork quilts, beautiful from afar, full of holes up close.
Then came my own SOS. Flower auction prices in the Netherlands had shot up like weeds after rain. A Dutch contact chuckled, “Usually when Europe sneezes, Africa coughs. Today Ethiopia sneezed, and Europe is wheezing.” Storms there had battered supplies, and suddenly, every rose had a golden price tag. That’s the joy of global agriculture: one storm, one pest, one export ban, and the entire supply chain dances like a nervous goat.
It struck me then: we are all interconnected. The investigative journalist and the agri-scribe, the vet and the medical doctor, the grower and the exporter. This week alone, Tambuzi and Nini farms are shining abroad, Ethiopian weather is rattling markets, and Germany is hosting a hip-hop-meets-flowers concert. Meanwhile, Francis Karanja is busy outsmarting pests in Kenyan greenhouses like a botanical Sherlock Holmes.
So yes, agriculture may lack the glamour of politics or crime, but give us pests, storms, and price surges, and you’ll see: our beat has thorns, but the stories bloom.