Reduction
By Muhammad Nasir Bashir
Dutse, April 24, 2018 (NAN) The Jigawa Government says it has reduced the number of hectares that would be cultivated by farmers in the Cluster Farming Scheme during the 2018 wet season farming.
The state Commissioner for Agriculture, Alhaji Kabiru Ali, said this on Tuesday, while speaking to newsmen in Dutse.
He said that the reduction of the farmlands from 20,090 hectares to 14,350 hectares would facilitate effective supervision by the state’s extension officers.
Ali recalled that in 2017, the farmers cultivated 70 hectares of groundnut, sesame, soya beans and rice in each of the 287 political wards of the state.
“This year also, we have not changed our cluster farming scheme approach, which is being implemented in the 287 political wards of the state.
“And our preparations for the 2018 wet farming season include the procurement of certified seeds of the four crops, in which we have competitive advantage; the crops are groundnut, sesame, soya beans and rice.
“This year, we have not changed these crops as well. This is because they give the highest returns in our state and our farmers are also willing to produce them.
“Last year, every ward in the state cultivated 70 hectares; this year, we have reduced it to 50 hectares for effective supervision.
“We realised that some of the extension officers attached to the cluster groups were not able to do what we expected them to do because of the volume of the work.
“So, now the hectares are reduced to 50 to enable us to effectively finance and supervise the programme; this is a little bit different from what we did last year,’’ Ali said.
Ali said that the identification of farmers who would participate in the programme was almost completed in the four zones of the Jigawa State Agricultural Supply Company (JASCO).
He added that the seeds, which would be given to farmers under the programme, were being processed at the state’s Seed Processing Centre in Birninkudu Local Government Area.
“We will follow the same pattern this year; we will give loans to the farmers based on the sizes of their farms and the farming clusters must be located in one place.
“We don’t want to see less than a hectare of farmland in a place, this we have told our extension officers,’’ he said.
Ali stressed that the programme was not a discriminatory agriculture policy.
“We don’t discriminate; we don’t play politics with our agriculture; we never heard the opposition complaining about our agricultural activities.
“So, anybody that his farm falls within the surroundings of a lead farmer, who is selected for the programme, automatically belongs to that group and he is a member of that cluster.
“So, everyone is with us and we are prepared to make all inputs available to our cluster farmers,’’ he said. (NAN)
MNB/MOL/OOK
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Edited by Mustapha Lamidi and Dayo Komolafe