Stakeholders seek use of technology to drive agricultural production – The Sun Nigeria

Stakeholders at the 2022 ThriveAgric conference have advocated the use of technology to drive agricultural production for food security .

The conference with the theme “Leveraging Technology to Sustainably Scale Agriculture: Smallholder Farmers in perspective’’, was organised by ThriveAgric bringing together various stakeholders in the agricultural sector to seek ways to boost agriculture.

Mr Ayodeji Arikawe ,Co-Founder ThriveAfrica, said the event was aimed at seeking ways to drive food production up .

He said: “So, part of the conference this year is mainly around bringing stakeholders together, the farmers, the uptakers and other partners to review what happened in the year and plan for next year .

“This year, we worked with over 450, 000 farmers providing them with access to finances, market and using technology to drive their growth.”

Arikawe said that it was a sad thing flood affected a lot of farmers,he however, hoped that there would be plans to helps farmers recover from the loss.

Ms Samira Bello , Partnership Lead, ThriveAgric ,said the conference was a significant milestone for the organisation’s partnership with the trade hub.

Bello said that the group had earlier partnered with the trade hub to work with 50 ,000 small holder farmers .

She said: “So far, we have been able to work with over 60,000 small holder farmers reaching more than 100 per cent of what we intended to achieve.

“This conference is like a close for the project in order to be able to project what next year should be like for not just us but all stakeholders within the agricultural space .

“This is on how they should they be using technology to ensure small holder farmers are sustainable and Africa is able to feed itself.”

Bello said that was why the conference was organised bringing people in the agricultural sector together, adding ”be it the input providers ,the uptakers ,youth and agri-businesses like ThriveAgric, among others.

She said the organisation was trying to be a key player to ensure that all stakeholders within the sector came together to collaborate to create future projects.

Mr Friday Alhassan, Humanitarian Advisor ,Catholic  Charitas Foundation of Nigeria,urged the Federal Government to make adequate investments and create a lot of publicity in the agricultural sector .

Alhassan said this would help more farmers leverage on technology to boost their produce.

He said: “This is because some of these technologies are alien to our rural farmers, so it behoves on government to do a lot of sensitisation to mobilise the farmers to  use technology.

“Fortunately for us, government had established agencies like the National Orientation Agency,even the extension unit of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture engage in education.”

Alhassan said that farmers could have technologies that would tell them the whether forecast, when to plant ,when to apply fertilizer and how to even go about their land preparation and crop rotation.

He said, ”the stakeholders were therefore, looking at how farmers could maximise the available land resources that they have to cultivate their crops and technology adopted could give them that kind of support they desire.”

He, however, said moblising the farmers to adopt technology was a very herculean task due to the heavy resources needed for them to adopt this technology driven agriculture and called on the government to invest in it.

Ms Deina Mayaki,CEO, Agriarche, said that the problems identified at the conference were shared ones.

Mayaki said: ”it showed that the stakeholders were not working in isolation but actually solving problems that many key stakeholders were seeking solutions to.

“So, it is an eye opener and it is very encouraging for me to see that these are shared problems, these are universal problems worth solving.

“The fact is that there are many technology solutions but how to adopt them is the challenge, so a lot of capacity building and leveraging on networks and development financing are a few take away that I got from here.”(NAN)

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