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Tamale, Ghana – A leading agriculture NGO in the North East Region of Ghana, the Centre for Ecological Agriculture and Livelihood (CEAL), has commenced training of 10 selected smallholder famers on how to prepare good compost manure.
Under its newly designed project dubbed “Organic Education for Farmers” (OE4F), it uses a strategy known as the Farmer to Farmer Extension (F2FE) approach to train selected farmers who would in turn train other farmers after acquiring the knowledge.
The aimed is to build the resilience of smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana with alternatives to produce food crops in anticipation of a worsening case scenario of coronavirus also known as COVID-19, a pandemic which has so far killed over 2 million people globally including Ghana.
The overarching objective is to train about 2000 smallholder farmers from 10 communities in the West Mamprusi Municipality. The communities are Gbeduri, Kpabgu, Kata, Diyani, Nayogu, korogu, Kukua, Kparigu, Boayini and Kperiga.
The new technology provided by CEAL would also support and strengthen smallholder farmers to develop and apply rich compost in 6 weeks as part of soil amendments using only locally available materials.
“In order to reach out to larger numbers of smallholder farmers in a short time, F2FE approach is deemed an effective and sustainable means of transferring knowledge and skill specific organic agricultural technology among farmers.
“To this effect, a first butch of leading and influential farmers are carefully selected, trained in specific organic measures in soil amendments. These lead farmers will then be supervised to train their colleague farmers within their communities”, Issifu Sulemana Jobila, Executive Director of CEAL said in an activity report shared with Savannah News.
Mr. Jobila commended the Ghana Organic Agricultural Platform (GOAP) and The Netherlands for their partnership and funding assistance respectfully.
According to the Director of Municipal Agricultural Development Unit (MADU), Mr. Mathew Adoa, no one knows what may happen during this partial lockdown of the country as a result of the covid-19 pandemic outbreak.
“Therefore it is important, the lead farmers take this training with all the seriousness it deserves because it is in their own interest as far as food and nutritional security is concerned”, he noted.
The training which was held at Walewale was jointly carried out by CEAL and the MADU. The 10 farmers were carefully selected using a set of criteria such as urgent need/poor, willingness to practice, the commitment to train and supervise colleague farmers to practice and duplicate the technology.
With only one single raining season regime, the 5 regions of the north are the most food insecure in Ghana. Farmers in these regions rely on annual crops for both household food and income. The last food crop harvest took place in October-November 2019 and households presumably have exhausted their foods by now. The only hope is to engage in production of food crops in this raining season.
Unfortunately, smallholder farmers in the North East Region and for that matter the entire Northern Ghana are conventional agricultural farmers. They depend heavily if not entirely on external inputs for primary production of food crops. These external inputs include improved varieties of seeds, chemical fertilizers, weedicides and pesticides. As the crisis of COVID-19 hits Ghana and continues with no sign of ever coming to an end anytime soon, the likelihood occurrence of distortion of the global supply chain of external inputs leading to uncertainty is very high. Thus, it makes the smallholder farmer in Northern Ghana more vulnerable to already worsened climate change impacts such as distorted rainfall patterns, weak/depleted soils, pest/disease attacks, poor seeds, weed attacks, and post-harvest losses due to poor storage systems.
It is against this background that CEAL begun this training and support for smallholder farmers in alternatives especially in soil amendments through fast developing compost manure preparations and applications in Northern Ghana.
Meanwhile, each of the 10 participating farmers were given a set of simple farm implements such as cutlass, pickaxe, spade and rake to carry back home and work with in their communities. This will enable them to practice and prepare their own compost manure for application in this year’s farming season.
By SavannahNewsOnline.Com/Philip Liebs
