By Anu Coker
I love farming, I have always been fascinated by growing plants and the beauty of growth. My father always puts his profession as a farmer, even with all the western education he has acquired. He made me love and appreciate farming. When I was 7 years old, we would help out in my Dad’s farm, with the poultry and picking eggs. There were loads of layers in cases .. maybe over 2000 in one coop. We had areas names for each coops; area A to J, and also we had the hatchery and where the boilers and Grandparents stock were kept.
I remember plucking cocoa pods and eating the white juicy area around the seeds …. ‘hmmm’…delicious. We used to get seeds for watermelon and have our own personal farms and watch the water melon grow from seeds to the big green fruit then. All of us budding farmers (my siblings, cousins and myself) would argue whose water melon it was because they grow and encroach on other peoples space…. You have to trace via the twine to know where the root stemmed from. My first secondary school, Mayflower fueled my love for farming because we had to have farming portions, we’d grow corn and peppers .. it is a beautiful thing to watch plants grow and harvest them.
The good thing about farming now is that it is a lot easier than way back, mechanized farming makes tractors and planters to till the land, you can use water sprayers to water your plant and you can get fertilizers and pesticides easily. Farming is big business, it’s the business of eating and being fed… people eat everyday…. People will always eat.. the first thing people think of is not shelter or clothes … it’s food … we need food for sustenance ….. without food in our bellies we cannot do anything … you can’t even get dressed to go out … or try to find a place to sleep…….. so food is essential.
The United States pays over $20 billion dollars on subsidy to farmers to enable farmers continue doing what they do.. Farming to feed the nation. The total budget for Agriculture each year is $146billion (https://nationalhogfarmer.com/business/united-states-department-agriculture-proposes-146-billion-budget) . The EU spends over £114 Billion on Agriculture each year (https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8036096.stm) with a Population of over 740million.
US and EU spend a lot on agriculture and still have a lot of educated people working within the agricultural sector. In Nigeria, with a growing population of over 170 million people, we are the most populous black nation in the world and we also have the highest literacy yet our agricultural sector has been labeled for the uneducated- this is wrong. Agriculture used to be our highest earner before the oil boom .. but now agriculture has become skeletal production and out last year’s budget was 83Billion Naira ($520 million) in a country that makes $292 billion every year. We can only manage an agricultural budget of half a billion dollars.
We as young and growing Nigerians have to embrace farming, we have to be farmers, we can be educated farmers, to feed our community and also feed communities and countries around us. It’s high time we stopped looking down on farming, With mechanized farming prevalent in all countries in the world, it is high time government pumped more money to farmers and encourage graduates to go into farming.
Nigeria spent (https://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/n1-3tn-spent-on-food-imports-worries-fed-govt/152489/) 356 Billion Naira on rice importation, we spent 217 Billion Naira on Sugar and 97 Billion Naira on Fish. I’m gobsmacked at these revelations when we have able bodied young men and women looking for work and will be willing to work growing sugarcane, and refining sugar, fishing in our vast waterways if we have the proper fishing vessels and also growing rice.
Nigerian youths need to embrace farming .. it may seem like a profession that tills the soil and breaks the back .. but our forefathers built our land on the Sun and their backs moving to the rhythm of the wind ….. it’s high time we stop turning our noses to the profession that is the most essential that feeds us. Let’s embrace and practice farming.
Image source: glogster.com