A game-changer experiment with rice and fish farming - Meet Seidu Iddrissu

Bugri is located some six kilometreseast of Boku. In a neighbourhood named Corner after a sharp curve, a baby was born to Iddrissu and Senab some 34 years ago. When Iddrissu performed the naming ceremony, he named the new one, his second birth but first boy, Seidu.

Seidu left school at age ten when, at that age, he could not figure out clearly what difference there was between letters that are close mirror images of the other. He started helping his father, a rice farmer, in the fields.

When he was fifteen, Seidu thought that time had come for him to leave his parents and go fend for himself. He arrived in Brekum in the Brong Ahafo region. Yakyere Farms hired him and put Seidu in charge of the farm. The farm owner, a returnee from Europe, had come home to invest in animal husbandry and was growing grass cutter, raising pigs, rearing rabbits and doing tilapia culture as well.

Adversities

Seidu served his master for five years, made some fortune and crossed over to the Ashanti to start his own farm. No sooner had he arrived in Ashanti than he heard devastating news that his father’s home, together with many other homes in Bugri Corner, had been destroyed by the spillage from the Badagri Dam. All his capital went into the reconstruction of the fallen home of his family.

The hunt for capital

To secure capital again for the intended business, Seidu travelled to Kumasi, then to Akokere, a growing community lying right of the highway connecting Kumasi to Obuasi. From here, Seidu would be travelling with his gang to wherever there was news of some job opportunity in the galamsey mines. For close to two years, Seidu tells me that he had had to go down on his knees every morning to implore God to spare his life in a business as risky as galamsey ganging.

As soon as Seidu realised enough capital, he ended the galamsey ganging and caught a bus back to Kumasi. After a few searches, he secured a piece of land at the outskirts of Nkawie. He paid rent for five years and started preparing the land for rice cultivation. His farm prospered. But after the sixth year, the landlords started tampering with the agreed terms governing the relationship.

The crop sharing formula, a ratio of 2:1 for the tenant and landlords respectively was slowly collapsing. The latter were increasing demanding more than their share under the agreement. Seidu started negotiating with another land owner in Afari.

new hope

Seidu settled in Afari the following year after finishing the negotiation of the rent for the new land. This was in 2013. And the new deal, unlike the previous one, had no share cropping formula. When the preparation of the about ten-ace-field was over, Seidu contacted the local MOFA officers for high yielding rice seeds. He sowed the entire field, then waited for rains. The rains came, in good proportion so that the rice prospered.

Seidu’s first harvest produced 85 cocoa standard jute bags for the main season. When he harvested for the second season that same year, he was able to fill 76 bags. Since then, Seidu has repeated same feat, sometimes even exceeding these records of harvest. It was only last year that his second harvest fell to 50 bags due to the extended draught.

This year’s first harvests has been phenomenally great. The second one is expected to tear down all previous records because the rains have come not only at the right time but in quantities right for his crops. And these crops, rice and some wild fishes in a mixed cropping system hardly seen in our part of the world, are expected to do well.

Costly experiment

Seidu is carrying out a costly experiment that he hopes will open many of the rice fields to a new stream of income hitherto undreamt about. He is raising wild fishes and already has a shoal that he is jealously guarding. Even though a large proportion of his fishes are the typical mud fish, he tells me they are ok for experimentation.

His farmer friend, a vegetable grower, snail farmer and yoghurt maker, a grad from the Cape Coast University, is helping Seidu with plans to slowly migrate from wild fishes farming to the more economically relevant tilapia culture. When I asked him if he had such expertise, his response expelled the fear I had harboured in my chest. “I grew tilapia in the Yekyere Farms. What is different here that stops me from repeating that again?”

Challenges

Seidu has real fears in spite of his high expectations. The fields he crops is water logged and a prairie kind by nature. His location, next to Afari Farms on the Abuakwa Sefwi road is heightening his fears. And he is right; at present, the metropolis of Kumasi has stretched to Abuakwa. When pressure for space for human habitation is put on Abuakwa by the colonising Kumasi, it might in turn release such pressures to Maakro, Mim and Afari will take the heat in no time. Seidu wonders what might happen to his fields.

To circumvent the conversion of his rice fields into human habitations, Seidu tells me he needs to find money to own the land he farms. Because, as it turns out, if he has to continue to farm rice and implement his mixed cropping experiment, he has to be able to invest in that field and hold it for twenty years. The resources for such a long lease, unfortunately, isn’t within easy reach for the farmer.

When I visited him in his rice fields and wild fish farm for this story, he held my hand and drugged me to a narrow space serving as a boundary of his field on the western side of the property. I saw foundations of a building rising from wet mud. As he points to the profile of the building, he tells me how real the threat is.

Seidu is, unlike the typical northern stock, slender and below five feet three. But he is handsome, cute and very firm. He is in love with his fields, his rice plants and his wild fishes. He arrives in the farm before the first rays of the sun touch the fields and leaves it after the sun had set. Except during harvests, Seidu does not believe anybody is good, careful and meticulous enough to work for him in his absence. Support him. He has to be around.