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National Foods in Bulawayo

Harare Bureau
NATIONAL Foods has invested about $6 million into contract farming for the 2015/2016 season with 4,200 hectares under the wheat crop. National Foods chief executive Mike Lashbrook yesterday said the company will continue supporting contract farming despite the prevailing economic challenges. He said the investment made towards contract farming was almost the same as the one made last year. “We’ve invested about $6 million on this year’s winter wheat contract farming, which is an investment almost the same as last year. We’re still driving our contract farming in partnership with PHI investments.

“The investments are spread between wheat, maize and soya beans. We currently have 4, 200 hectares of wheat on the ground,” said Lashbrook. He said the company was expecting a yield of 25-30 thousand tonnes of wheat depending on how the season unfolds. The country requires between 350,000 and 450,000 tonnes of wheat per year but production has been declining due to inadequate funding.

Millers have been struggling to produce enough for the local market due to a number of challenges such as power shortages, high operational constraints characterised by under stocking and high corporate borrowing, labour costs, inadequate financial resources and imports. Their operations continue to be plagued by insufficient local agricultural production from the local market and liquidity constraints. National Foods has so far invested around $20 million into upgrading operations since 2009 with an additional $8 million earmarked for further capitalisation this year.

The bulk of the expenditure went towards upgrading the food processing plants in Harare and Bulawayo’s flour milling plants.