Climate Change: Aggregation of Farmers in Mega Estates Necessary for Improved Agricultural Production

Dike Onwuamaeze

The Managing Director of National Agriculture Development Authority (NALDA), Mr. Cornelius Adebayo, has identified aggregation of farmers in mega farm estate as the necessary step toward attracting financing, investments and infrastructures that would checkmate the onslaught of climate change and improve agricultural productivity.

Adebayo stated this last week when he appeared as a panellist at Bank of Industry’s (BOI) Climate Resilience Knowledge Series themed, “Building Climate Resilient Enterprises in Nigeria for Sustainability, Livelihood and Inclusive Growth.”

He said: “Aggregation, is as a word, comes from having farmers in clusters. Clustering is the first step and other solutions will run on it. If we want to drive production in Nigeria, we must bring our farmers in clusters and investors will come and it will be easier to secure those farms with trenches that can be used to irrigate the farm.

“So, we have to aggregate our farmers, provide strong investments in irrigations, give them extensive training and have extension workers to guide them. With that the issues we are having in production will come down. Once productivity is taken care of, prices will come under control and everything will become more stable,” Adebayo said.

He also said that government is using the mega farm estate model that can host 2,000 farmers in a cluster to address issue of land title that has been denying smallholder farmers access to finance.

He explained that a farm estate could host 2,000 smallholder farmers in a 10,000 hectares of land.

He said: “I know the government is addressing the problem of access to land. In Kwara, Benue and Bauchi States we are having large expanse of lands that are cleared with solar energy and space for processing.”

Adebayo said: “Nigeria smallholder farmers have issues with land title. The solution we (government) have for this is mega farm estate. They do not have land title, so they do not have access to capital. They cannot afford to irrigate because it is expensive.

“The reason we are doing farm estate model is because we want to aggregate as many farmers as possible, give them proper title, have an anchor who can assist them and be an aggregator to stand for them and guarantee some financing that they need.”

He also said that farmers in the northern Nigeria are exposed to more acute climatic problems than their counterparts in the south. Adebayo stated that land preparation is the greatest obstacle to the practice of mechanised farming in Nigeria.

“The federal government is addressing lack of mechanisation in agriculture with orders for tractors from Belarus. The efforts are there. Government is doing its own. But the biggest problem we have is that tractors cannot be applied in most of the lands. 

“We often get to site and discover that they have not removed the stumps and stones. If you put a tractor on that land it will be destroyed immediately.  The problem of mechanised farming in Nigeria is not about lack of equipment but lack of land preparation. First, we do not prepare our land appropriately. This is the foundation of everything,” he said.