Dizengoff: Making farming attractive in Nigeria through mechanisation

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9 years ago

From left: Humphrey Otalor, Marketing Communications Manager, Dizengoff Nigeria; Antti Ritvonen, Country Manager/CEO, Dizengoff Nigeria; Oscar Walumbe, Integrated Project Manager and Olatunde Agoro, Chief Executive Officer, Latag Venture Farms, during a media tour of the Dizengoff greenhouse farm in Lagos.

The cultivation of food in Nigeria is generally very labour intensive particularly with the small farmer holders, as the manual work embarked by farmers and their families is very strenuous and time consuming and in Nigeria, this is a major constraint towards achieving an increase in agricultural production. Also, the day to day labour of farming is a major contributory factor in the migration of people, particularly young people, from the rural areas to the urban in pursuit of a better life.

In Nigeria, a significantly high proportion of arable land is still been cultivated by hand tools, thereby making the farming profession unattractive even among young people.

To ensure a significant growth in the agricultural sector and making it an attractive business both to families and the young people, efficient and adequate farm machineries must be deployed to farms.

According to the Commercial Manager, Tractor & Implements, Dizengoff Nigeria, Damisa Enahoro, the company “is committed to providing high-quality machinery and appropriate technology to suit all types of farming operations in Nigeria.”

Damisa further assures farmers that the company “is providing solutions to farmers no matter what their farm size or type of operation is.”

According to him, farm cultivation could be substantially increased through mechanisation, which is labour saving and directly increases yields and production, inputs of hard labour by farmers and their families can be substantially reduced if they have access to or use carefully selected machines and equipment, adding that the labour invested could be used for other productive activities, while deploying the appropriate equipment to farms could also have a direct impact on yields and the area under production.

Within mechanisation, there is a large number of possibilities and technologies available for farmers to choose from, which range from choosing between the different sources of additional farm power, to selecting from the various other production enhancing mechanical technologies available, he added.