‘We are cultivating rice at a loss’

How many hectares do you cultivate?I am a smallholder farmer who has never accessed any loan or any major support from government. I only cultivate 5 to 6 hectares not because I cannot do more but because I do not have the resources and strength to do so. You know, until recently when the Minister […]

How many hectares do you cultivate?
I am a smallholder farmer who has never accessed any loan or any major support from government. I only cultivate 5 to 6 hectares not because I cannot do more but because I do not have the resources and strength to do so. You know, until recently when the Minister for Water Resources gave us some tractors here at Bakalori, we were using hoes for our farming because commercial tractors are very expensive to hire.
It seems you have some difficulties farming here?
Our biggest problem here is lack of tractors. Without tractors there is no way one can talk of mechanised farming or enhanced agricultural production. You cannot successfully do irrigation farming without tractor. Some of the 15 tractors provided by the Minister for Water Resources for the over 35,000 farmers here have since broken down. We need heavy tractors here that can withstand the test of time.
We also have problems of inadequate fertilizer. The two or three bags some of us get through the GES cannot be enough for even half a hectare. And any farmer that makes the mistake of buying fertilizer from the market even as low as N5,000 a bag, will not be able to recover his money. Rice has no effective value chain where you can sell your rice at a good price. Ask any farmer here, the cost of producing a bag of rice from buying the seed, fertilizer, other inputs, clearing the land, planting, harvesting, trashing, processing and taking it to farm is N6,200. The highest anybody has ever bought a bag from us is N6,500. In most cases, people price a bag as low as N5,500 or even N5,200. We are farming rice at a loss.
We also have problem of quela birds. Our children do not go to school when they start driving the birds away. The problems are many. When we hear government saying it is helping farmers, we always wonder. Who are the farmers? How are they helping us? Do they even know what we are passing through?
Who supplies you with fertilizer?
The federal government gives us three bags through the GES arrangement while the state government also gives us occasionally. But the two put together do not meet our requirement. That of the state government doesn’t come always. But whenever they want to give they give us as many as five bags or more and that of the state government is N1,000 per bag.
Do you have access to hybrid rice seed?
Because of the difficulty we experienced some two years ago, the so-called rice hybrid seed given to us here in Bakalori that refused to yield; most of us are very skeptical about using seed that come from government. We have fallen back to our usual seeds like Jamila, CP and about four other types. In a hectare we harvest as much as 2 to 2.5 hectares’ yield.
How successful is irrigation farming here?
It has been very successful. All we require from the dam management is enough water and we are getting that.
Do you have a standard means of selling your rice after harvest?
There are companies and major buyers that will come around promising to buy up our rice after harvest. In most cases we will even increase production but they will not show up. We cannot keep our rice for a very long period waiting for buyers because it may spoil due to lack of silos or standard means of preserving it. Again, the farmer might have engaged labourers that worked for him in the farm on credit and such people will insist that you pay them shortly after harvest to go and feed.
At a time of rice glut, we sell a bag for as low as N4,000. The fact is we are not farming to gain; rather, we invest in the farm and sell in bulk to get your money back in bulk. Any rice farmer that makes the mistake of keeping a record of how much he spent on his farm and realized how much money he lost after sales will not go back to rice farming.