Platform · Farm
The Mkushi operation
The crop starts on our own estate in Mkushi, on the Central Province farming belt. What we plant, how we grow it and who works the season are decisions taken on the farm, not bought in.
- Location
- Mkushi, Central Province — Zambia’s commercial irrigated farming belt
- Scale
- 1 800 ha under irrigation; 3 dams holding 17.8M m³ (dry-season draw ~65% of reserve)
- Crop
- Flue-cured Virginia — tobacco ramping from 80 to 600 ha, grown alongside maize (incl. seed maize) and wheat
- Season labour
- A core of 40 key and 200 main staff, expanded by up to 300 seasonal roles with the workload
Agronomy
One estate under one agronomy plan. Seedbeds, transplanting, topping and reaping follow a single programme, so the leaf that reaches Lilayi is uniform enough to grade predictably. Flue-cured Virginia at 3 500+ kg/ha cured yield under centre-pivot irrigation, with eleven years of per-pivot soil records (fertility, pH, nutrient trends), drone survey with precision fertiliser application, and an 80%+ John Deere fleet backed by the estate’s own workshop, parts store, fertiliser store and eight fuel tanks.
Seedbeds: float-tray propagation
The tobacco programme is specified around float-tray propagation. Seed germinates in trays floating on shallow water beds under protective cover; water and nutrition are dosed at the bed, not guessed at the plant. Trays deliver a uniform, transplant-ready stand with no soil-borne disease carry-over, on the programme’s schedule rather than the weather’s. That control is what a ramp to 600 ha of tobacco needs: even transplants make even field stands, and even stands grade predictably.
Curing
Curing happens on the estate, under our own barn management. Barn strategy follows the Group’s published curing-fuel policy — deforestation-free by design: fuel comes from dedicated fuelwood plantations sized to the crop, and high-efficiency barn designs materially reduce fuel per kilogram of cured leaf.
