Life experiences pushed man into wealth through agriculture

Deep in the lush forest of Edor, Ikom Local Government Area of Cross River State lie four expansive cocoa and plantain farms. Visitors would need more than a day to traverse the entire expanse of these verdant fields. One of the farms has over 72,000 cocoa trees and over 50,000 plantain stands, where harvest is […]

Deep in the lush forest of Edor, Ikom Local Government Area of Cross River State lie four expansive cocoa and plantain farms. Visitors would need more than a day to traverse the entire expanse of these verdant fields.

One of the farms has over 72,000 cocoa trees and over 50,000 plantain stands, where harvest is almost on a weekly basis, the farm records showed.

The young man behind these farms is Mr Felix PaulMary Ekol, who was inspired by the circumstances of life to tap the wealth in agriculture.

Armed with a master’s degree in Accounting, Mr Ekol set up the farms himself, planting cocoa trees, plantain suckers and sleeping in the open field day and night on the farm.

Today, Ekol is called “Minister of Agriculture, Local” in his community, where his farms are, and Ogoja, where he lives with his family.

“In my high school days, I was supplying food items to students on campus. They saw it and said that even the minister of agriculture hadn’t done this, so I should be named Minister of Agriculture. I told them to add ‘local’ to differentiate between the real minister of agriculture and the cloned one, which is myself,” he said.

Growing up in a farming community helped him, but the real challenge that pushed him further into agriculture came from the rough experiences of life.

“While growing up as a child, we practised farming, but the moment I gained admission into the university in 2010, life became so hard and difficult because of financial requirements in the school system – JAMB registration, clearance and all of that. I looked at it and said I really needed to assist my parents, who were peasant farmers, to advance whatever they were doing, so I picked a special interest in agriculture, such that I could go from class to class educating the students, giving them orientation courses in their spare time and all of that. That passion kept growing over the years. Today, 2025 marks our 15 years of real-time service and engagement in agriculture,” he said.

In an interview with the Weekend Trust on his farms, Ekol said the story of his beginning is a tale of resilience, hope, passion and determination, which spurred him, within 15 years to set up farms that produce about 1,000 tonnes of cocoa and several tons of plantains, in addition to other multiple crops.

Recounting his childhood experience and the struggle to raise money to finance his education and the hopelessness of getting a job or empowerment after NYSC, the young man decided to return to the farm to do something different, working on the farm up to midnight with his late younger brother.

“Today, I have a capacity of harvesting, within the existing four farms, not less than 1,000 tonnes of cocoa per harvest. Plantain should give me a truck weekly from the farm, meaning that I harvest four trucks in a month,” he said.

Although the young farmer did not study agriculture or agriculture-related fields, he has helped many people set up their plantain and cocoa farms in many places.

“I studied accounting, and I was doing it as one of those frustrating things because I didn’t have anywhere to lay my hands on. Let me just do it to sustain myself through that space so that hopefully, when I graduate I can gain a good job in government parastatals, agencies or whatever. However, after we graduated and the real mirage of being a graduate dawned on us after several certification trainings and all of that, nothing was forthcoming, to a point where I was frustrated. So I said to myself that if I had gone back to the little farming I was doing while going to school, I would advance it. That was when I brought in agricultural skills and meshed them with accounting knowledge and named it ‘Biological Assets Farming,’” he explained.

Ekol’s knowledge of accounting, however, has enabled him to do something very unique on the farms that will never make him broke at any point in time: planting short-term crops to finance long-term crops.

Mr Ekol, who is in his 30s and a father of two, described his four farms as “firms” and “biological assets” and explained the idea of planting multiple crops.

“I narrowed my knowledge of accounting into biological assets, and in biological assets we have income stream diversification, such that for you to have a long-term plan, you should be able to have a short-term plan. So, the economic trees serve, first, as the long-term plan, while the other crops like the tuber crops – yams, plantain, sweet potato, pepper, vegetables and others – serve as a short-term plan. What we simply do now is, if for instance I am to establish a biological asset farm, I will use a particular plot of land and cultivate a whole span of it with plantain. Those plantains now will first of all control weeds because when they form a canopy, it reduces the weed velocity, and with that canopy, it can house other shrubs and trees that need and require temporal shade. That way, you have a plantain farm in that particular plot of land, you have cocoa growing simultaneously, then, you have palm trees interjected sparingly within that farmland. Now that plantain, within the period of seven to eight months, starts generating resources for you to maintain the farmlands that housed the other long-term tree crops like cocoa and the likes. So that is exactly the idea: to diversify income streams, such that the short-term crops can finance the expenses of long-term crops and not keep you out of business because there’s a way you go into the business and you will be frustrated within a period of time where you invest so much and there’s nothing coming out. That is the idea,” he explained.

The farmer has also set up a foundation called Tymdua Foundation, where he empowers and educates other young farmers about agriculture, giving them cocoa seeds, plantain suckers and other supports to encourage them to see opportunity in the sector.

Through the TymdauR Global Limited, Ekol, who is founder and chief executive officer, along with other partners, is leading an expansion into the production of cocoa, plantains, ogbono, oil palm, pear and other tuber crops, as well as other auxiliary service delivery systems.

But the major challenge is poor road access to the farms, which makes it extremely difficult to evacuate harvest during the wet season.

He called on the government at both federal and state levels to intervene in the construction of access roads to connect communities to their farms, which he said would go a long way.