Know Your True Farming Cost So No Middleman Can Cheat You
Ko Zaw Myo is a rice farmer in Pyapon Township, Ayeyarwady Delta. He grows monsoon paddy on four acres his family has worked for three generations. Last November, a broker from Yangon offered him 520,000 kyat per hundred baskets. Ko Zaw Myo accepted immediately because the number sounded decent and last year he got only 480,000. He felt relieved. But when his wife Ma Hnin Si sat down with a notebook and added up seed cost, fertilizer, diesel for the pump, hired labor during transplanting, and the interest on their informal loan from the village money lender at 5% monthly, the total cost was 490,000 per hundred baskets. Their profit for five months of backbreaking work was 30,000 kyat — less than two days of construction labor in Yangon. Ko Zaw Myo had no idea he was essentially working for free because he had never once calculated his full input cost. The broker knew this. Every broker knows this.
Ko Zaw Myo is a rice farmer in Pyapon Township, Ayeyarwady Delta. He grows monsoon paddy on four acres his family has worked for three generations. Last November, a broker from Yangon offered him 520,000 kyat per hundred baskets. Ko Zaw Myo accepted immediately because the number sounded decent and last year he got only 480,000. He felt relieved. But when his wife Ma Hnin Si sat down with a notebook and added up seed cost, fertilizer, diesel for the pump, hired labor during transplanting, and the interest on their informal loan from the village money lender at 5% monthly, the total cost was 490,000 per hundred baskets. Their profit for five months of backbreaking work was 30,000 kyat — less than two days of construction labor in Yangon. Ko Zaw Myo had no idea he was essentially working for free because he had never once calculated his full input cost. The broker knew this. Every broker knows this.
The farmer who cannot calculate their exact cost-per-unit is not actually a business owner — they are an unpaid laborer on their own land, and every middleman in the supply chain is designed to exploit exactly this blindness.
List all 8 categories of farming input costs including hidden costs like own-labor and loan interest within 10 minutes
Calculate cost-per-basket or cost-per-viss for their primary crop using a phone calculator with actual numbers from their last season
Identify the minimum selling price below which they are losing money, and state this number from memory
The farmer who cannot calculate their exact cost-per-unit is not actually a business owner — they are an unpaid laborer on their own land, and every middleman in the supply chain is designed to exploit exactly this blindness.
List all 8 categories of farming input costs including hidden costs like own-labor and loan interest within 10 minutes
Calculate cost-per-basket or cost-per-viss for their primary crop using a phone calculator with actual numbers from their last season
Identify the minimum selling price below which they are losing money, and state this number from memory
12 learning cards · 1 quiz
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