REASONS WHY MANY LOCAL COMMERCIAL FARMS ARE NOT GROWING AND LATER SHUT DOWN. By Agronews - 21/07/2017
Some of the biggest indigenous
commercial farms that are somewhat functional, some mere shadows of
their former selves, are owed by top politicians, business tycoons and
technocrats.
They include Maizube Farms in Minna
owned by a former Head of State, Abdulsalami Abubakar; Sebore Farms in
Mayo-Belwa, Adamawa State owned by Murtala Nyako, a former governor of
the state; Nagari Integrated Dairy Farm in Keffi and Oriya Farms in Doma
owed by two former governors of Nasarawa State, Abdullahi Adamu and
Aliyu Akwe Doma respectively.
Others are Efugo Farms in Kuje, FCT
belonging to Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu
Ogbeh, which only got back to life recently after many years of
epileptic operations, thanks to the CBN commercial agric scheme loan it
got for expansion; Anadariya Farms in Tiga, Kano State established by
Alhaji Usman Dantata; Chukwudili Farms in Anambra – now completely dead;
and a number of Songhai farms initiative dying off in states, like that
one in Amukpe, Delta State.
Others in the Western zone include
Obasanjo Farm, Ota, Ogun State owned by former president Olusegun
Obasanjo; Ojemai Farms in Edo State owned by Sir Joseph I.A.
Arumemi-Ikhide; Jovana Farms Mushin, Lagos owed Arinze Onebunne; Animal
Care Services Konsult in Ogere Remo, Ogun State established by Dr
Olatunde Agbato; Folawiyo Farms Limited Apapa, Lagos by Alhaji Wahab
Iyanda Folawiyo and Peter Adeniyi Anu-Oluwa Farms, Ibadan.
Beside pockets of successful commercial
farms, there is a large number of other indigenous farms across the
country in various aspects of farming but which have gone out of
business.
Experts and farmers while sharing their
thoughts with Daily Trust, outlined a number of factors which they say
are responsible for the death or difficult situations many of the
indigenous commercial farms found themselves in.
Accessing finance, a herculean task
Daily Trust caught up with Professor V. O
Okoruwa, an agricultural economist with the University of Ibadan and
asked him why many local commercial farms are folding up despite the
country’s huge agricultural potentials.
He pointed out the issue of accessing working capital was one of the major challenges for many of the farms.
“Capital in the sense that they need
what we call ‘working capital’ to continue to carry out their farming.
Where will they get this money – it is from the bank. If interest rate
is too high and you are going to borrow from the bank you know the
implications. Farming is not just like what is already produced that you
sell immediately for returns. Farming has a gestation period of between
three to six months depending on what you produce. You are going to tie
the monies on all these things and at the end you are going to pay a
huge sum in interest,” he said.
“Those who are surviving are probably
those who have been in the business for long and they have made some
capital, so all they are doing is just ploughing back some of their
capital to survive. If you are barely surviving with your working
capital, you are not covering the fixed cost; the future is bleak,” he
said.
Talking of finance, Kabiru Ibrahim, an
architect, AFAN National President stressed that, “When banks start
asking you about the business plan, the processing and all that,
whatever you do they have a way of telling you that you are just not
there.”
Also, Samuel Aede who owns a greenhouse
farm in Masaka, Nasarawa State, emphasised that farmers are not even
able to access intervention funds and that commercial banks made it
extremely difficult for them while some of the banks do not even have
agriculture as a top priority maybe because of high risk or probably
because the margins are very small if they really have to lend at the
agreed CBN rate.
Chief Okafor Lawson Nkem, chairman of
Loremm Integrated Farms noted that banks will only come in when you have
succeeded. “So how can you succeed if the banks are not there? That is
the difference between banks in Africa and those in Europe,” he
observed.
Management a key factor
Professor Salihu Dadari, is an
agronomist with the Ahmadu Bello University’s Institute of Agricultural
Research, Zaria. He told Daily Trust that some of the farms are owned by
people who apparently stole money from government and ploughed part of
the loot into setting up farms. They often don’t care what goes on in
the farms because the money is not their hard earned income.
The researcher said the owners of such
farms do not want to get experts to manage them, but go for people who
don’t have the technical ability and pay them peanuts with the resultant
effect that the farm pack up.
In a telephone interview with Daily
Trust, Samuel Aende, a young commercial greenhouse farmer said the
challenge that other green houses have is that they don’t carry out
research. They just go in because people are buying into it. And because
people tell them that there is a lot of money in it, they go into it
not really finding out the right information on the technical know-how.
“It is continuous; different factors
come into play because of continuous and intense production. So you have
to keep updating or expanding your knowledge to know how to handle
different things, scenarios or challenges that will come.
“Yes, it is not easy but you have to
continue researching; you have to continue reading, you have to continue
to increase your knowledge and ideas; you have to interact with other
farms to know how they are going and what their experiences are and how
they handle matters. It is a continuous thing. People just think it is
plug and play, that you just make money and go; No it is not like that,”
he stressed.
Architect Kabiru, also speaking on this
issue said Nigerians looked at farming as something everybody can do,
adding that they don’t look for expertise, and “that is how the problem
starts. Let take poultry for instance. You can’t say you know poultry,
you can lose the whole flock because you don’t have the right technical
know-how.”
Professor Dadari noted that Nigeria has
all the experts but the farmers don’t want to get to them. “Our problem
is that we have inferiority complex. The expatriates coming in to
invest make use of some of our experts here to achieve what they want.
How come our farmers don’t want to do same?” he asked.
Your time, your farm
Many farmers do not have time to visit their farms, a factor that affects them.
But for Aende, it is a daily affair: “I
visit my green farm almost every day because I am involved in my own
activities, unlike those that go to theirs only when the need arises or
just felt like it. I am hands on, I do things myself so I manage it
myself and it is my business so I have to be there and I am involved
with it.”
Chief Lawson Nkem, a poultry farmer,
while speaking with Daily Trust in his farm in Oke, Nasarawa State, said
he visits his farm every day – a situation which, he said, has enabled
him to monitor very closely every development in the farm. If you don’t
have time for your farm, it will collapse. “Don’t start a farm if you
don’t have time to monitor even those who manage it,” he advised.
Corruption play a part
Professor Dadari said some of the
large-scale farms were not established properly because the resources
that were used in setting them up were gotten through corrupt means, by
manipulating the institutions designed to help farmers.
He said most of the big farms belonging
to top government functionaries hardly survive because after they leave
office the farm begin to have its own problems, adding that when they
are in office, the used resources belonging to government and their
position to maintain them.
Costs of inputs, processing, mechanization major challenge
AFAN president, Architect Ibrahim stated that the cost of inputs is very high such that you hardly break even.
He also said there are other aspects of
the products that are not sold in their primary form – the farmers have
to process them to get the actual value – noting that most of the farms
are not as mechanized as they should be.
For him, these are myriad of reasons why we have many indigenous commercial farms folding up.
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