Despite the economic gloom and doom due to the coronavirus crisis, one farmer in Nepal’s southern plains is not just not giving up, he is pinning his hopes on an ostrich venture taking off when business returns to normal.
C P Sharma has always been a pioneering entrepreneur who saw great potential in farming at a time when most young Nepalis were leaving the land for salaried jobs in the city or overseas.
Pandemic offers chance to revive farming, Krishna Paudel
Sharma is using the lockdown period to finish construction of Nepal’s first large-scale ostrich farm in Tilottama Municipality of Rupandehi with Rs1.6 billion in investments. The farm is integrated with a mushroom and strawberry farm, and has a cold storage with 10,000 ton capacity.
“This is an integrated farm, and the cold storage will give us the flexibility to store produce for times when there is a shortage of the items in the market,” explains Sharma, whose venture is already producing 3 tons of mushrooms daily and has a capacity to produce 12 tons, creating jobs for at least 800 local people.
The farm has a lot of other downstream benefits: the ostrich farm needs commercially grown grass and local farmers are growing it as a cash crop to sell to Sharma’s farm.
C P Sharma graduated from Shankardev Campus in Kathmandu in 1987 and did his masters from Russia. Despite an option to remain abroad, he returned brimming with ideas to create a viable agri-business that created employment, and in a small way reversed the outmigration trend.
“After experiencing life abroad, I felt the urge to return to Nepal,” he says. “My relatives all live here, and I wanted to work in my own country.”
The turning point came one day when he was traveling to America with a Japanese colleague. He was pulled aside to be questioned by US immigration officials, but his friend was permitted to pass through. After 45 minutes of questioning, he was finally cleared.
“It changed my whole outlook on life. I was no criminal, yet they treated me like one just because I came from a poor country,” Sharma recalls. “I decided to do what I could to live a dignified life in my own country.”
He returned to Nepal in 1995 and saw great potential in the fertile lands of the Tarai. He had seen ostrich farms in the Ukraine, and tasted the meat in upscale restaurants in Paris, and knew there would be demand for ostrich meat.
The Maoist war forced him to shelve his plans for a few years, but he imported 1,500 ostrich eggs of which 900 hatched and only 200 survived. Sharma was frustrated, he realised agriculture was not like any other business – it needed patience because of the risks and slow rate of return. His partners quit, but he decided to purse his goal.
Being a visionary entrepreneur, and more importantly a passionate farmer, Sharma began working his way up to where he is today. His son has now returned from the United Sates to help in the family business and his wife, who is a physician, helps out when she can.
Besides ostrich, Sharma saw sound business potential in mushrooms. Nepalis consume 25 tons of mushroom daily, but much of the high grade mushrooms are imported from India, China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Because of the shortage of fresh mushrooms, most hotels were using canned alternatives.
Before the coronavirus Sharma was selling 3 tons of mushroom daily, but his plans of ultimately producing four times more may have to be postponed because of the collapse of the tourism industry.
One of the by-products of his integrated farm is high-grade compost from ostrich manure with straw, wheat husk, and sugarcane skin. The compost is recycled to farmers who grow the commercial grass on which the ostriches feed.
The global pandemic may have slowed business, but Sharma is confident the economy will bounce back, and that many Nepalis will also be returning with fresh ideas and expertise from abroad.
He says: “Many of my friends who settled abroad are now planning to return to Nepal. I hope I have shown that it is possible to do well in Nepal, too.”
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