This month we are featuring stories from Larry Sharp. Larry’s new book ‘Mission Disrupted: From Professional Missionaries to Missionary Professionals’ tells 27 stories and is out now!
It started 45 years ago when Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, living near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe gave 50 newly hatched chicks to their seven-year-old son, Peter. “See what you can do with them,” they said. By the time he was 17 years, he was raising 10,000 chicks a week and was on his way to a successful and colorful missional business career.
Today Peter is a visionary, entrepreneurial, God-fearing, faith driven guy and the CEO of Hamara and Heartland Foods in Zimbabwe. The heart of the business is the poultry industry – including hatching, broilers, and layers. He explains it in its simplest iteration: 30 birds will lay 22 eggs daily; the farmer can save five for his family and sell seventeen. This provides more income than half of the poor families in the country.
Hamara’s influence extends to one-stop distributors in 13 cities making them one of the largest chicken distributors in the country. One of the genius components is their outgrower program with over 300 small scale farmers since 2002 growing an average of 20,000 chickens a week each. They are propelled by an incentive “model farmers” program by which farmers can move from the Bronze stage to Silver, Gold and then to Platinum, and be part of something bigger than themselves.
In a country where one third are extremely poor, there is opportunity (market pull) to break the yoke of poverty. Peter cites David Livingstone as an example, who was the first European to reach the area in the 19th century and was motivated to break the yoke of slavery. But while working hard to reduce poverty, Peter never misses an opportunity to link his work and company to the grand eternal purposes of God – that more and more people come to worship and follow Him. And he does so by daily reminding himself and his staff of the amazing life and grace of Jesus. Says Peter, “Jesus chooses ordinary people like us and wants us to live in relationship with him as he gives the favor to share his amazing life with others.”
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