EDO State governor, Mr Godwin Obaseki, last weekend, inaugurated 1000 hectares of cleared field in Sobe Farm Settlement in Owan West Local Government Area of the state for maize production.
Speaking during the inauguration, the governor said the maize cultivation which could directly empower 200 farmers to become millionaires, was part of his administration’s Accelerated Agriculture initiative to create jobs in the state.
Shedding light on the execution plan for the initiative, he said the phase would target job creation for 1, 000 farmers, through the cultivation of 5,000 hectares of maize farms across the local government areas of the state.
“Today is the first step towards actualising the 200,000 jobs promised by my administration. If we invest in agriculture, we can do more than 200,000 jobs in Edo and Nigeria as a whole.
“We had an agric business workshop to brainstorm on the challenges in our agriculture sector and we discovered that land preparation was a major challenge in the state.
“This initiative is to make land preparation easy via mechanisation for our farmers,” Obaseki stated, adding that the initiative was in partnership with Saro AgroSciences Limited, which he said, would provide technical support for the programme.
Governor Obaseki also disclosed that mechanisation centres would be situated closer to the proposed 5000—hectare maize field to enable the farmers to manage five hectares that would be allocated to each of them.
The Group Managing Director of Saro AgroSciences, Mr Oluwole Adeyegbe, said the scheme would target a minimum of four metric tonnes of maize yield per hectare, which he said, would be bought directly from the farmers.
He said the company was also collaborating with the state government for the second phase of the initiative.
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