My grandfather farmed on a less than one hectare of land for more than a decade on a yearly crop rotational basis. The entire family land was in excess of fifteen hectares but it was divided up among the brothers and sisters. Even if he had the capacity to produce more than his normal annual yield through fertilizer application and other agro inputs, the size of his land is a major limitation and to thousands of other farmers in Ekiti like him.
Land fragmentation is one of the major reasons why farmers in Ekiti have not been able to move past the subsistence farming (hand to mouth year in year out) to commercial production, so how can we be of help?
Politicians have done a fair share of what is expected of them, we have paved road all over Ekiti although with a bit of potholes, but generally passable and should I add that every nook and cranny of Ekiti is connected to the national electricity grid as well. So the challenge is for our civil servants to up their ante by giving us value for the money (salary delays is not an excuse) the state pays, and here is how: Each of the local government areas has sets of farm machineries mostly sitting idle and rotten away, machines which includes tractors, planters, sprayer, ploughing disc among others… so we can’t really hold the politicians responsible for the non usage of these machines.
My suggestion is to have the people at the State ministry of agriculture to open twenty hectares of farmland at each town within Ekiti and i'm sure the farmers will be willing to contribute the fuel money for such venture.
Imagine the possibilities of having a twenty hectares of maize per town, multiply by the first fifty towns within Ekiti, on an average yield of two tons per hectare with the current market rate of maize per ton at fifty thousand naira, we are in the range of one hundred million naira in three months!
Kwara state has one of the largest animal feed milling plant in the country, and we have an expressway to Ilorin from Ekiti, with less than two hours drive, so let us ask ourselves here, what is the volume of produce from Ekiti that goes into feeding that mill? I guess less than 10 percent, Ilesha people are known as commodities buyers from time immemorial, yet international brewery Ilesha is less than three hours drive from Ekiti and I ask again what are we selling to Ilesha of our farm produce? Answer in silence but think about it aloud
If we open the land as I had suggested and with an average yield of 2,000MT of farm produce in three month then our civil servants at the ministry of trade and investment can walk up to the animal feed mill in Kwara or the International brewery Ilesha or even move further up to Ibadan where we have more than four feed mills competing for raw materials, to negotiate on behalf of the farmers to get a better returns on their collective produce. So how does the government gain in all this? Simple, when the ministry of trade and investment negotiates and sell on our behalf, they do a direct debit of their necessary but agreed tax from the source and we the farmers in turn get paid and we would be able to send our kids to school, feed our family, save more for the next planting season in comfort. The government wins and we win.
If we can maintain the feat above for three years without a break, I’m sure small mills and their associated industries will spring up in Ekiti, because of the access to raw materials in an organized selling structure by the ministry of trade and industries. This is only a maize scenario, we can as well replicate same for cassava, sorghum, rice, and sunflower among others.
Well I’m one of your sons although I lived and worked abroad but with a practical knowledge of my state and from practical standing point I give a special thank you and recognition for the Oba alayeluwa of Iye –Ekiti who rallied round his people to secure for me a 100 hectares of land after visiting 5 other towns without success, we did a major land clearing, preparation and planting without any negative issues at all and we have matured maize fields ready for harvest and we are estimating the worst case scenario of three tons per hectares …..
Ure Ekiti a s’oju ra ooo ase!
Seye Ogunrotimi
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