It was mid-morning when I went to the patch of land that my father had planted tapioca on, carrying a hoe with a handle longer than I was tall. Wetan (pronounced way-thun, thun as in thunder) was where the tapioca patch was on our five-acre land, planted mostly with rubber trees. Wetan, kulon, lor and kidul are the Javanese words for east, west, north and south respectively. Of the four, only kidul is somewhat known to the non-Javanese-speaking world, thanks to Indonesian movies about Nyi Roro Kidul, the mythical spirit of the South Java sea.

I was only 10 years old and could barely scratch the surface of the sun-baked soil when I took a few tentative hits with the hoe.

Hoping to exert a greater force, I swung the hoe all the way back over my shoulder only to be greeted with a low thud and a cry. Even now, after years of being a journalist I still cannot string a sentence to describe the horror of seeing my baby sister, then a toddler of about three years old, covering the top of her head with her tiny hands and wailing in pain.

She had silently crept behind me to have a closer look at what I was doing. Apparently the blunt end of the hoe had struck the top of her head. I dreaded to think what would have happened if it was the sharp end that had made contact with her head. It was my father’s hoe, the metal gleaming, polished by constant use, the edge kept straight and sharp by his blacksmithing file.

There was a bit of blood on her head. I carried her off to my mother, who quickly dabbed some medicated oil on the wound while berating me for injuring my sister instead of harvesting the tapioca. Luckily my father was not home. We never told him about the incident. He already had enough problems raising us nine kids.

I channelled the intense guilt of having injured my sister by swinging the hoe with all my might and in no time at all I had dug out enough tapioca to feed the chickens. Yes, all that trouble was just to feed the chicken

It was before Ramadhan and we had to make sure the 50 or so chickenswere well fed so that they would lay enough eggs to make bauhulu and other kuih for Hari Raya Aidilfitri. Apart from the tapioca in the morning, the chickens were fed coconuts in the afternoon. It was my father’s duty to chop open coconuts with his trusty axe. The axe was too dangerous for his kids to handle. I’d seen him shave the hairs on his forearms with the axe to test whether it was sharp enough.

Fast forward 42 years and we are just a few days away from the Chinese New Year, followed by Ramadhan in about two months. And the supply of eggs is still inconsistent, to put it mildly.

The rising prices of animal feed has been quoted time and again as the main reason behind the inconsistent supply of eggs. Less feed means less layer chicken, less layer chicken means less eggs.

Of course producing chicken feed for huge layer farms is not as simple as digging up tapioca to feed a handful of chicken but I believe Malaysia has the means, machinery and infrastructure to produce affordable animal feed for domestic use.

In 2021, 11-year-old Maryam Muzamir of Kuantan Methodist primary school bagged three top awards at the International Invention and Innovation Competition in Toronto, Canada with her innovative livestock feed from common food waste called YAM2.0. A video of talk show host James Corden praising Maryam’s feat has been making the rounds on the internet. It underlines the fact that Maryam’s invention is of world standards, not chicken feed at all.

The term chicken feed has been used to indicate things that are cheap and insignificant. We now know that it is not insignificant but we need to make it cheap again. Expensive chicken feed not only sounds wrong but is also detrimental to our egg supply.

In 1985 we ventured out to make cars without any prior experience in the industry. Some rubbished the idea back then but we still have Proton and Perodua today. If we can make affordable cars, why not chicken feed?

Hopefully, the government, especially the Agriculture Ministry, has started the ball rolling to ramp up affordable livestock feed production. Too much focus on the short term solution of importing eggs will have dire consequences for the nation’s food security.

Importing staple foods is not new; it was practised by the Melaka Sultanate 500 years ago, but that is a topic for my next piece.

Before I end this piece, I would like to state that my baby sister recovered from the head injury I inflicted, went to study in Universiti Putra Malaysia and is now a teacher in Muar, Johor. She still has the scar though.

The writer is a journalist, writer, retro bike enthusiast, blacksmith, tinkerer.. not necessarily in that order. Spent 20 years in the manufacturing sector before joining NST as a journalist.