Synergos Nigeria, an agriculture transformation support group, in collaboration with Technoserve Nigeria, has developed crop calendar to save costs, reduce farm activities and increase production and profit margin for farmers.
Synergos’ Country Director, Mr Adewale Ajadi, made this known, at the crop calendar validation workshop for participants from Benue, Kogi and Kaduna in Abuja, on Friday.
Crop calendar is a tool to support farmers and agriculture extension workers across the world.
It provides solid base for emergency planning for the rehabilitation of farming system after any disaster.
According to Ajadi, crop calendar is helpful to farmers in knowing how to plan their farming season right from land preparation through crop establishment and maintenance to harvest and storage.
“ It provides timely information about seeds to promote local crop production, which contains information on planting, sowing and harvesting periods of locally adapted crops in specific agro-ecological zones.
“It will help in preparing all the raw materials needed, determine the budget for the crop, plan the labour required and organise workers for land preparation, planting and harvesting.
“We are at the time where we have to use our ingenuity, knowledge and understanding to manage the technology available to provide solution and increase our productivity.
“I hope this crop calendar validation will open conversation that will be far deeper than just transaction.
“With the technology we have, all of us has mobile phone, we have to really get to the root not just symptom,’’ he said.
Ajadi commended the participants for buying into the initiative, saying the attendance was an improvement over last year’s to bridge the gap of years of neglect and to start to do what is right to promote Agriculture in Nigeria.
He added that as part of that States Partnership for Agriculture (SPA) planned efforts to promote agriculture, the group called Hackthon to use digital technology to begin to capture information such as this.
He said that the group was not going to stop as long as it has the resource to support all those people finding solution to change the nature of Nigeria Agriculture from subsistence into business orientation.
Prof. Tarfa Bitrus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, said that crop calendar development for some comparative crops in the selected states like Benue, Kogi and Kaduna states, would help boost productivity in those states.
Bitrus said that the main focus of the workshop was to come up with proper site and specific crop calendar for these crops in the specific states, according to their comparative advantage.
“The essence of crop calendar is to be able to bring stakeholders together around the activities of value chain of selected crops.
“So that each stakeholder will know the right time and the period whereby their own intervention or interest along the value chain will be much needed,” he said.
He noted that the other objective was to align federal and state ministries efforts with the cropping activities of the particular crop of their interest.
According to him, the government also needs to develop some policy that will fit into the calendar for the various chains of the crop, so that the stakeholders surrounding the crop or commodity will participate effectively.
The don urged all the stakeholders to come together and look at the crop calendar and make it sustainable.
Bitrus said some of the essential messages in the crop calendar for farmers would be to know the best period to plant, apply fertiliser, managing the weed, harvesting, processing and some other salient agronomy practices.(NAN)
