‘Stop presentation of farmers as the most deprived’

The 2013 Upper Manya Krobo District Best farmer, Mr Moses Kumah Ayittey, has called for an end to the wrong notion that farmers are the most deprived in the society.

He said the wrong notion is one of the major reasons that make the youth to refuse to invest in agriculture and trooped to the commercial towns chasing none existing jobs.

Mr Ayittey said there was evidence that when farming was properly managed and the appropriate procedure and technology applied, the returns to the investor could be as high as the returns to the best investments in the economy.

He was speaking at the 4H-Ghana Upper Manya Krobo District maiden Project Exhibition at Asesewa.

Mr Ayittey appealed to teachers to stop using weeding as a punishment to students because it made them to regard farming as a continuation of their punishment in school.

Mr Emmanuel Sena of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) called on the District Assembly, traditional authorities and captains of industry in the district to support the 4H concept to be extended to many schools in the district.

Mr Kweku Boateng, the Chief Executive Officer of 4H-Ghana, said soon the world population would reach 7 billion and food would be needed to feed the population.

He said 4H-Ghana was teaching the youth through their school gardening how to adopt high yielding seeds and the use of best agricultural practices that would enable them to increase their yield and incomes in future as farmers.

Mr Boateng said the introduction of the Dupon Pioneer seeds and the new planting protocol to the 4H-Ghana Clubs in the district helped farmers in the district to increase their maize yield from six mini bags per acre to 20 mini bags.

He called on the District Assembly and parents to support the 4H-Ghana sustainable school feeding programme introduced to two basic schools for it to be extended to many schools in the district.

Mr Trent Mcnight, Chief Executive Officer of Agricorps, a non-governmental organization based in the United States which has been supporting 4H-Ghana with US agricultural graduates to help implement their agricultural programmes, said if the youth are taught how to run agriculture as a business, they would grow to feed Ghana and the world.

Mr Mcnight, a businessman and a wheat farmer, said as a young 4H member in the US, he started farming with five cows and now has 3,000 cows in Texas.