In decades to come, the agriculture systems will need to change to meet the challenges of rising demand for food, its accessibility, affordability, improved nutrition and health. Against this backdrop, experts are canvassing the establishment of smart agricultural villages, DANIEL ESSIET reports.
Agriculture employs 70 per cent of the nation’s population. Experts say of this figure, nearly 80 per cent are small and subsistent farmers. With meagre land holdings and virtually no financial support, they have managed to survive. Nearly 60 per cent of them live in villages and are not making much profit. Given a choice, some of them would want to quit farming.
But this will not make the Programme Co-ordinator, Farmers Development Union,Victor Olowe, happy as he sees agriculture as the ultimate indicator of economic growth. Like others, he is worried as markets have failed to infuse confidence through economic prosperity among food growers. This is as a result of the revenue farmers get from their commodities.
The good news, however, is that agriculture is now a subject of national discourse. To make farming economically viable, Olowe called for the development of a new plan, under which the government would add fresh impetus to rural economic reconstruction programmes.
By this, he means strong interventions in the rural areas with public sector investments.
The government, according to him, has to do more to provide modern amenities in the villages. A beginning can be made by revitalising agriculture in a manner that brings back the smile to farmers’ faces.
People in the rural communities, he said, comprised mainly small farmers, who need improved farming technologies, training, access to roads, transportation, markets, electricity, schools and health facilities to improve their livelihood.
Rural roads, for example, Olowe said reduce transport costs and enable farmers to bring crops to market. They also increase access to hospitals, leading to improvements in health.
Consequently, he aligned with the global crusade to establish smart agricultural villages, which would contain an array of techniques ranging from simple local crop and water resource management, that offer scope for beleaguered farmers battling erratic weather patterns.
Setting up a smart agric village, he explained, requires providing weather forecasts and crop advice; rainwater; harvesting; reducing water needed for irrigation; conservation tillage and agro-forestry. Others will include site-specific nutrient management and precision application of fertilisers and ‘energy smart’ features through fuel-efficient engines and crop residue management.
The villages will not only bring internet connection to the hinterlands, they will also provide support for sustainable agricultural practices.
To make the villages work, he said, Nigeria needs a network of small scale industries linked to agriculture, and a strong network of rail and road corridors with amenities such as education and health for all to transform agriculture.
Smart agric village as a strategy for boosting food production is showing promising results in other parts of the world.
A project of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme under Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), kicked off in India and Nepal in South Asia in 2012. The project is being expanded to four other Indian states of Bangladesh; Vietnam in southeast Asia; Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda in East Africa; West Africa; Guatemala and Nicaragua in Latin America.
As part of the project, some villages are changing their cropping practices in various ways.
According to experts, one of the new practice is to use direct seeded rice in which rice seeds are sown directly on a dry seedbed. This is in contrast with the traditional practice of sprouting rice seedlings in a nursery and transplanting them to tilled fields with standing water.
Another technique, experts said, is to replace the traditional method of continuous flooding of rice field with alternate wetting and drying, using a monitoring instrument called a tensiometer that helps farmers decide when to irrigate their fields.
One of the key approaches in turning villages ‘climate smart’, experts said, is crop diversification from rice-wheat systems, to include shorter-duration varieties and switching to maize, pulses and oil seeds that require less water.
An innovative component of the project is the use of information communication technology (ICT) tools to disseminate ‘climate smart’ agro advice to farmers, by sending voice and text messages in local languages to farmers’ mobile phones. The messages include weather forecasts and recommended actions, information on pests, seed varieties and techniques for conservation agriculture.
The important thing, however, is that the system is credited with making food more widely available and affordable to large areas of the world.
The Director,Africa Region, Cassava Adding Value to Africa (CAVA), Dr Kola Adebayo, said there is need for government incentives to enable farmers switch to various modes of agriculture, involving a workable mix of traditional and modern farming methods, including reviving local seeds, multi-cropping and smart water usage.
Added to this is that Nigeria is in need of low-cost/energy efficient and ecological sustainable cold chain technologies.
Farming the climate-smart way, he said, would give farmers shorter-cycle harvests, translating into higher income for them.
Where they are supported, he said, farmers can use technologies to produce exceptionally flat farmland and ensure equitable distribution and lower consumption of water.
Adebayo said there are tolls to help assess the exact fertiliser needs of his crops. Text and voice messages received on phones about weather forecasts, would help farmers’ sowing and irrigation to perfection.
To this end, he said, the government has to support farmers to adopt climate smart practices in villages.
The challenge in inducting farmers into new models of agriculture is that the older generation has no faith in the new system, preferring “to stick to tried and tested methods practiced for generations”.
A consultant to the World Bank, Prof Abel Ogunwale, said with changing demand for food, there is need for rural farmers to innovate.
With smart agric villages, he said, the government will be able to address sustainable rural development involving economic and social infrastructure.
Such villages, he explained, will promote agricultural innovation, ensuring that extension and advisory services, market institutions and infrastructure are inclusive.
He said building smart agric villages will accelerate industrialisation, adding that there is need to further explore extension of workers’ role as a catalyst of transformational change.
In particular, he said, additional efforts were required to enhance productivity by building up high-tech industries such as packing, biotechnology, electronics, ICTin such places. He believes smart agric villages provide the answer, emphasising how valuable it would be in improving food production throughout the supply chain.
As climate change threatens food production, countries fight back by arming farmers with precise advice on growing conditions.
With weather extremes caused by climate change now widely seen as a major threat to food production in Africa and South Asia, a new report has shown that many countries are already providing millions of farmers with innovative “climate information services”, which allow them to anticipate and adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
Countries are mobilising community radio stations, government meteorological services, religious groups, agriculture extension agents, schools and farmers to develop and distribute forecasts and farming strategies. These would provide front-line defence against the effects of climate change on food production, according to the study by the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
Titled: “Scaling up Climate Services for Farmers: Mission Possible”, it is the first analysis of this new approach to adapting to the stress of climate change.
“It’s encouraging to see climate information services emerging that are drawing from many types of experts and engaging a wide range of partners to devise effective strategies to help farmers cope with a changing climate,” said Dr. Arame Tall, CCAFS’ climate services scientist and lead author of the report.
Tall added:“They are allowing farmers to protect themselves from the effects of weather extremes, such as droughts and floods, and also helping them take advantage of especially good conditions. The involvement of farmers in developing these climate services is essential to their success.”
The CCAFS report features 18 case studies from Africa and South Asia. It finds that countries are taking a variety of approaches to climate services, which generally involve developing high-quality, location-specific data on temperature, rainfall, wind, soil moisture and ocean conditions, among other things, that help farmers decide the best crop variety to cultivate and when to plant and apply fertiliser.
The analysis revealed that the services work best when they involve broad collaborations between, for example, meteorologists, agricultural experts, farmers and agriculture extension agents. In many of the programmes, farmers practice a kind of citizen science, using rain gauges to collect data on precipitation and then feeding it into centralised data repositories.
“The involvement of farmers in developing these climate services is essential to their success,” Tall said.
Prior to the advent of climate services, farmers in most developing countries had been going it alone. And while indigenous knowledge often proves accurate, the shifts in growing conditions caused by climate change are increasingly moving beyond anything many farmers or their ancestors ever experienced.
“The increasing vulnerability of small-holder farmers to climate risk is a major motivation for much of the interest and investment in climate services—not only to help farmers plan for tomorrow or the upcoming season, but to help them be better prepared for climate change 10, 20, or 30 years from now,” said Dr. James Hansen, a co-author, who led the CCAFS Climate Risk Management research team.
