Mira Mehta is a veterinarian turned agriculture entrepreneur and the brain behind Tomato Jos, an agricultural company into the cultivation and processing of Tomatoes.
She just recently launched her company’s N4bn tomato plant based in Kaduna which will help farmers maximize their seasonal produce which before now they usually discard excesses during gluts. With Tomato Jos, she is revolutionizing the way agriculture produce especially Tomato is being handled.
In a thread, she talks about herself and how she came into the agriculture business as she reveals that rather than she going after agric,instead it found her. Enjoy reading:
Hello everyone! My name is Mira (@shoutsandmiras) and I run a farming and food processing company called Tomato Jos (@teamtomatojos) in northern Nigeria. I’m so excited to share my story with you, and introduce you to agribusiness in a new part of the world ☺️☺️☺️
A lot of people ask me how I ended up in Nigeria, and my answer is always “well, I didn’t exactly choose Nigeria, but I guess Nigeria chose me!” My journey into ag is similar – I think agriculture chose me too!
I grew up in Cambridge, MA with very little farming exposure.
My parents immigrated to the US from India (my dad) and Finland (my mom), and I was fortunate to visit both countries growing up. I had some family on my mom’s who farmed in Finland, but I thought I was going to grow up to be either a concert violinist or a veterinarian…
In 2008 I applied to work for an NGO that was focused on HIV/AIDS in developing countries. They asked me “is there anywhere you WOULDN’T go?” and I said “no, I’ll live anywhere!”
And that’s how I ended up in Nigeria! I didn’t know much about the country at the time.
My work often took me to various hospitals in northern Nigeria. I remember looking out the car window on a trip to Kano (it was probably December 2008) and seeing tomatoes covering the ground for miles and miles all around us! It looked like we were driving on a red carpet
I asked my driver what was going on and he told me that this was a seasonal glut- all the farmers’ tomatoes had become ripe at the same time, and market prices had crashed as a result. The farmers were trying to dry the tomatoes so they could sell them later.
The image of all those tomatoes stayed with me for months afterward. I just couldn’t get it out of my head.
At the same time, I was learning about Nigerian cuisine. Two of the most popular dishes in Nigeria are made with… you guessed it: tomatoes!
Jollof Rice and Stew. 😋
I’ll have to do a separate thread about Jollof Rice later in the week, because the controversy is legendary across West Africa! Each country believes that they make the best version Jollof Rice… And man, things can get heated!
Anyway, back to my story!
As I started learning how to cook these two delicious, spicy tomato-based staples of Nigerian cuisine, I found that tomato paste was frequently used in addition to (and sometimes instead of) fresh tomatoes. But all the tomato paste was imported…
The idea came to me pretty quickly: why not use all those tomatoes that farmers were already growing in northern Nigeria to make local tomato paste, instead of importing paste from Europe and China?
Well, it’s one thing to have an idea and another thing altogether to act on it! I often told myself about the day that I’d run my own tomato factory. But I didn’t have the guts to quit my day job.
It wasn’t until December 2013, 5 years later, that I finally took the plunge…
By then, I was back in the US in grad school. I was applying to some pretty random jobs that I didn’t care too much about, and I was still talking to anyone who’d listen about my tomato paste idea. A friend of mine told me to quit yapping and get to work – so I did!
I was one of very few @HarvardHBS students who decided not to look for a job during my second year of business school. Instead, I did a bunch of desk and field research, and invited some friends to help me put together a business plan for Tomato Jos.
It was very clear to me that I wanted to run a social enterprise: a business that would do good for the surrounding community while also running at a profit. When I visited and interviewed tomato farmers as part of my research, I saw a need for education & financial support.
Part of my research took me to California. Man, those fields are just BEAUTIFUL. I mean… they take precision ag to a whole new level.
I was really fortunate to find tomato growers and processors who actually talked to me and took me under their wing.
Every single person I talked to, growers and processors alike, told me that before I could invest in a factory, I needed to learn how to be a farmer. If I couldn’t grow tomatoes at a high enough yield per hectare, and at a low enough cost per ton, a factory would never work.
And so, my work began! This is why I say “farming chose me.” If it were up to me, I guess I would have built a factory right away… and that factory would have never run. Guess I dodged a bullet 😅😅
I started off in Nasarawa State, in a village called Panda. Here’s me in 2014:
A very kind farmer (the world is full of kind farmers!) told me I could farm rent free on a corner of his land, as long a I wasn’t going to take up more than 10 hectares or about 25 acres of farmland. I started off farming about half a hectare.
I had no clue what I was doing. But somehow, I figured, I was going to knock it out of the park! In that first season, my team convinced two local farmers to farm with us and try our “improved methods.”
What is it they say about riding for a fall again…?
Well, disaster struck when our borehole caved in! This meant we had NO WATER. Open field tomatoes are typically farmed in the dry season, but they require a lot of water. And our source had just vanished! This is the first of many times when irrigation has kicked my butt.
We fixed the borehole, but the plants (and their plant mama!) underwent a lot of stress. That, coupled with the fact that I had no real ag experience, made for a pretty disappointing first season. We ended up getting a yield of just 8 MT per hectare…
Anyway, I’ve got a whole week to share more of my story, so let me start so speed this intro up! I can get into more detail later, depending on what folks want to learn about.
Long story short, it took 6 years to get
from this… to this:
… And in 2020, during the peak of the pandemic, we managed to build a factory! We did our first production run in March/April of 2021, and we look forward to FINALLY launching our retail product in Nigeria later this year.
