Small holder farmers to improve profitability

Small holder farmers at Serebourso a farming community at the Asante Akyim Agogo District in the Ashanti Region have undergone a day’s agricultural training programme through drama to enhance production.

The drama which was on the theme “Using improved seeds: The Farmer’s Security to Enhanced Livelihood was put together by ACDI/VOCA-ADVANCE with funding from the USAID with the generous support from the American People.

The primary objective of the training was to enable farmers to adopt the use of the improved seeds especially the Obatampa and mamaba varieties to increase yields. The organizers of the training used drama to enforce key messages that could easily be remembered by farmers and to ensure maximum impact and easy adoption of the technology. It is also expected that farmers would easily learn from the programme and share new experiences with their colleague farmers for maximum impact.

The project activities have been designed to transfer new and innovative technologies to small holder farmers to improve their productivity and profitability from investment in the agricultural sector of the Ghanaian economy.

In an interview with Business & Financial Times Mr. Francis Essuman, Programmes Manager for Maize Drama at Agogo ADVANCE Project said his outfit had outlined quite a number of programmes to improve the yields of farmers to impact positively on their livelihood.

According to him the training programme has become possible because of some farming challenges they identified the farmers were confronted with. The challenges he mentioned included low yields, poor soil fertility and other farm inputs like weedicide. The rest are lack of access to credit facilities and poor market access among others.

He confirmed that plans were underway to link some of the farmers to financial institutions that are prepared to give these farmers the needed financial support to improve upon their farming activities. “Opportunity International Savings & Loans have agreed to support 50 farmers and so far 20 of them have opened account with Opportunity International Savings & Loans as a precondition” he said.

He added that as part of the programme, farmers have been put into groups and so far eight groups have been taken through capacity building.

Maize is the third leading cereal crop after wheat and rice in developing countries. Of all farm inputs, high quality seeds and planting materials exert the most profound influence on agricultural productivity. In spite of all the advances made in crop improvements in Ghana, many farmers have not benefited from the use of improved seeds because of lack of awareness and other socio-economic constraints.

A lot of farmers continue to use seeds of the local varieties that do not yield as much as the improved ones. Improved maize varieties such as obatanpa and mamaba yield between 4-6 MT/Ha whilst the local varieties yield 1.5 MT/Ha.

With the increase in human population, it is therefore important that yields per unit area are increased to be able to feed the population.

Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement Program (ADVANCE) is a four-year program funded by USAID and implemented by a consortium of local and international partners led by ACDI/VOCA. The goal of ADVANCE is to facilitate a transformation of Ghana’s agricultural sector to achieve increased competitiveness in domestic and regional markets. This transformation will be achieved through strengthening the channels in which smallholders are linked to agricultural services and markets. The outcome will be increased incomes, the emergence of a commercial agriculture class and improved services in rural areas, contributing to economic growth and poverty reduction.