In its drive to improve the agricultural value chain through wheat production, the Flour Milling Association of Nigeria has empowered over 4000 farmers and 100 women in the just concluded farming season across 7 states in the country.
According to the report released by the association, farmers in Kano, Jigawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Kebbi and Sokoto state were distributed input such as fertlisers, improved varieties of seedlings with 5000 hectares of land to boost wheat yields across the country.
FMAN also recounted the introduction of the data green application, a mobile app to capture and report data from the field.
It added that the association had recently collaborated with the lake Chad research institute and released 4 wheat varieties to Nigerian farmers such as the bread wheat, borlaug-FMAN, Neloki-FMAN, with the yield potential up to 7t/ha with maturity period of 85-95days and durum wheat: Bayoreca -FMANand Cirno-F MAN with its potential up to 6t/ha and maturity period between 90-95 days.
Specifically, Ahmed Tijani, FMAN Agroconomist said the association is executing operations on agro programs of 4000 and 5000 hectares across the 7 states for the 2023 farming season.
He added that, “one of the core values of FMAN in line with the agricultural wheat value chain is in ensuring that farmers get input right on time for them to get the maximum yields required right on time.”
Also speaking, Ibrahim Saidu the Agric Operations Manager said the FMAN has trained 100 women farmers to apply the best practices suitable for sustainable production.
In his words: “We’ve also been able to have over 100 female farmers in addition to what we have been doing this year. We’ve also had a lot of our farmers who have been able to grow their field sizes.”
However, the wheat farmers, while commending the efforts of FMAN in booming the successes of the industry, also identified some of the challenges they faced, including subsidy removal, high temperature, naira redesign, and climate change.
Y’au Ado, who is a wheat farmer lamented that the industry was greatly affected by the naira redesign policy which came unprepared for.
“The government introduced policies which indirectly affected the farming activities without much consideration of its implication to farmers, it was just introduced suddenly. The monetary change policy caused a drastic negative impact which resulted in huge losses by the farmers .”
On his part, Alhaji Idris said, “currently petrol is sold at N550. Let’s take the previous crop season as an example, not every farmer had the ability to purchase petrol at that rate in filling stations. Subsequently the petrol subsidy removal had affected farmers woefully.”
Despite the challenges, farmers were still able to record good harvest with an increasing boom in wheat production.
Keturah Kaboshio, Fatima Umar, Surakatu Mohammed on behalf of the beneficiaries appreciated FMAN for the training and timely input distribution which had helped them grow their production yields.
Alhaji Idris Adamu, also a wheat farmer, claimed to own about 37 hectares adding that, “the wheat business is now booming.”