Neglecting Peasant Farmers ..... All Cooperative Farmers Association

Farmers like Ameze, Iyimade, Edemakhiota, Agbonlahor, Madam Isibor and others, un-doubtedly need seeds and simple farming equipment. Food aid alone is of limited value. As the Chinese proverb says: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Generally, African peasants farmers, Most especially Farmers from Edo State are not helped to succeed as farmers, though there are exceptions in some other African countries.

Since colonial times, Africa’s best land has been devoted to the production of cash crops for export. In addition, large farming projects have been developed to provide food for the more affluent cities. Thus peasant farmers have often been pushed off good land and forced to subsist on land that is less productive. Left to fend for themselves, Africa’s peasants have degraded fragile land by over cultivation and overgrazing, and by cutting down too many trees. Large portions of African lands are turning into desert.

Their position has also been undermined by price-fixing. To please city dwellers, many African governments keep the price of farm produce very low. This policy, according to the scientific journal Nature, has “contributed powerfully to the decline of agriculture, the hunger of the same urban populations and the dependence of potentially fertile Africa on food imports.” Working on redirecting this design however, the All Cooperative Farmers Association (ACFA) have concluded to embark on a more tedious kind of farming but with required quality produce from the farm. And this scheme is called REVISITING THE NATURAL FARMING

ACFA Encouraging Natural Farming

COMPOSTING is almost as old as home gardening. Roman farms had their compost pits, where human and animal excrement were piled up along with weeds, leaves, and whatever household wastes had accumulated. From time to time, water was added to assist in the process of decay. A thousand years later, in Moorish Spain, an agricultural treatise described three methods for making heaps of “artificial dung,” as the compost was called—pigeon dung being added to hasten decay.

With the advent of community landfills for waste disposal and no-fuss-no-muss chemical fertilizers for easy use on lawns and gardens, home composting in general became almost a rarity. But composting has recently made a comeback. Landfills were beginning to overflow, states were putting restrictions on what and how much could be dumped, and dumping fees might range from $30 to $100 a ton. Moreover, environmental concerns have increased, and this also has made composting fashionable once more.

Not only is composting back, it is back bigger than ever. Its eye is on landfills as the next target. “Composting is a promising technology that may end up helping to solve the ever-growing waste-disposal problem,” said an article in The New York Times Magazine. “Its proponents believe it is capable of making use of up to half the garbage—kitchen wastes, yard trimmings, even some waste paper—that most Americans now throw out. They believe composting can create farms that build the soil instead of destroying it, that compost can replace eroded or damaged soils, protect young plants from disease and reduce dependence on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.”

Gofta in its effort to help farmers grow rich and natural food stuff, has intended to imitate his brothers world-wide to also embark on composting as a way of producing natural manure for our plants rather than relying on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.