Groups gives 5,000 farmers agric inputs

Some actors in the agricultural sector, the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme (WAAPP-NIGERIA) and the National Agriculture Extention and Research Laison Services (NAERLS), have distributed over 30 agricultural technologies on seeds, livestocks,  Poultry and fish to over 5000 farmers across Nigeria.

The Acting National Programme Coordinator,  WAAPP-NIGERIA,  James Apochi, during the exercise, expressed satisfaction on the progress the institute has made, adding that NAERLS is a huge success story for WAAPP-NIGERIA, because the objectives of WAAPP is to generates and deseminate agricultural technologies for adoption that would lead to increased agricultural Productivity in Nigeria.

Addressing farmers in one of the adopted village for the cultivation of improved seeds in Giwa local government area, Kaduna states, yesterday, Apochi promised that the programme will expand it scope and reach in the next phase.

He noted one of the ways to achieve it objectives is through the adoption of villages around the research institutes, while working with farmers group to ensure  that the technologies gets to the grassroots.

The Coordinator of NAERLS,  Professor Murtala Galadima, said with the help of WAAPP-NIGERIA, the institute have deseminated 30 different agriculture technologies on poultry, crop production, livestock management,  post harvest technology and income generation for women.

According to him “We promotes a lots of income generation activities for women like tie and dye,  swining, pomade making, . And for farmers we have researches on maize,  rice and fish, in all we gave about 30 technologies which we are deseminating on everyday basis with over 5000 direct beneficiaries and most of the neighbouring villages are also part of the indirect beneficiaries of the technologies. So it is safe to say we have up to 20000 indirect beneficiaries.

“Research institutes in Nigeria are working round the clock developing technologies for planting, harvesting, weed control and post harvest processing and more of those technologies are laying in a shelf because of problems,  they are not being deseminated to the end users and farmers who can benefit from it, but with the coming of WAAPP into the picture, the story has changed,”.

He urged the federal government to come up with a policy to compel each tie of government to do what it suppose to do as far as agriculture is concern,  adding that if  every section plays it role, agriculture will develop beyond it present state.

The Chairman of the corporative,  Mallam Muhammed Auwal Iyunusa, urged the government to include the training of farmers on the proper identification and planting of improved seeds.