Paying at the weighbridge

There is a moment at every collection point that decides whether a grower comes back next season. It is not the handshake before planting and it is not the price. It is the ten minutes between the scale settling and money changing hands.

We settle growers the day the crop is weighed in. That is the single practice that has done most for our supply, and it is worth explaining why, because on paper it looks like the least efficient way to run working capital.

What the alternative actually costs

The usual arrangement in the trade is that a farmer delivers and waits. A week, sometimes a month, occasionally until the buyer has sold on. It is presented as a cash flow question for the buyer, and it is. What is less discussed is that it is also a borrowing decision for the farmer, made on the farmer's behalf, without asking.

A smallholder delivering sesame in November has costs that do not wait. Household needs, school fees, land preparation for the next cycle, sometimes a loan from the input he took on credit at planting. If the money for the crop is not there on the day, it comes from somewhere else, and somewhere else is usually informal credit at a rate that makes the whole season marginal.

So the farmer absorbs a financing cost he did not agree to, on behalf of a buyer who did not mention it. The next season, when someone shows up at the field edge with cash and a slightly worse price, that farmer sells. This gets called side-selling and treated as a loyalty problem. It is not. It is a memory problem, and the buyer created the memory.

Side-selling is not a loyalty problem. It is a memory problem, and the buyer created the memory.

The sequence at the scale

Our collection points sit inside the growing area, which means the crop is weighed the day it is bought rather than after a journey. The sequence runs the same way every time, and every step of it is visible to the person selling.

The crop is weighed and the reading is shown. Not read out. Shown. A scale the seller cannot see is an argument waiting to happen, and it is an argument the seller will assume they lost.

Moisture is taken and the reading is shown. This is the number that adjusts what the crop is worth, so it cannot be a private figure the buyer keeps. If moisture is high we say so at the scale, explain what it does to the weight that will still be there in three months, and apply the adjustment in front of the person it affects.

The agreed price is applied. Agreed means before planting, not on the day. More on that below.

Payment is made. Same day, on the spot.

None of this is complicated. What makes it rare is that each step gives up a small advantage the buyer could otherwise keep.

Why the price is agreed before the crop is in the ground

Aggregation exists because a smallholder alone has almost no bargaining power and very little market access. Arriving at an open market on harvest day with a few bags means taking whatever the day offers, on a day when every other farmer in the area is arriving with the same crop.

Contracting ahead of harvest removes that. We agree volume and price with grower clusters while the crop is still growing, which means the farmer plants against a known number and we plan against known supply. Neither of us is exposed to what the market does in the week everyone harvests at once.

This only works if the number holds. A pre-agreed price that gets revised downwards at the scale because the market softened is worse than no agreement at all, because it teaches the grower that our paper is not worth anything. If the market moves against us, that is our position and we take it.

When the market moves against the agreement

This is the test of the whole arrangement, and it comes around most seasons.

A price agreed in June can look generous in November if the market has softened, and the temptation to revise it at the scale is real. Plenty of buyers do, usually framed as a conversation about quality. The grower has no leverage at that point, because the crop is already on the truck and taking it home again is not a serious option.

We hold the number. If the market has moved against us, that is our position and we carry it, because a pre-agreed price that only holds when it suits the buyer is not a price. It is a suggestion, and everyone in the cluster will understand it as one by the following season.

The reverse happens too. When the market runs above the agreed number, growers have every opportunity to sell elsewhere and some do. That is the risk we accept for the certainty we get, and treating it as a betrayal would be dishonest given we would not be revising the price upward on our own initiative either.

Keep the paper

Every transaction at the scale produces a record, and the grower gets a copy of it. Weight, moisture, price, amount paid, date.

This sounds bureaucratic for a cash transaction under a tree. It matters for two reasons. It settles disputes that would otherwise come down to whose memory is better, which is a contest the grower always loses. And it is the beginning of the lot record: the same cluster, month and moisture reading that follows the crop to Abuja and ends up in front of a buyer asking what is in the bag.

The traceability that a processor in Lagos values, and the fairness a farmer in Jigawa values, turn out to be the same piece of paper.

What it costs us

Being honest about the trade: paying on collection is expensive. It ties up working capital across an entire harvest window, before a single bag has been sold on. It means we cannot buy beyond what we can pay for, which caps volume in a good season. And it removes the float that most of the trade quietly runs on.

What we get back is supply we can rely on and quality we can influence. A grower who trusts the arrangement will clean the crop properly, dry it fully and bring it to us first, because there is no reason not to. A grower who has been paid late once will bring the crop to whoever is standing there with money, in whatever condition it came off the field.

The quality of what arrives at our store in Abuja is decided months earlier, at a scale in Jigawa, by whether the person selling believes they will be paid that afternoon. That is the entire mechanism. Everything else we do about grading and sorting is downstream of it.