‘We irrigate groundnuts, beans with high yield’

Conducting this reporter round his irrigated beans farm in Hadejia, Malam Musa Siri-Siri said he has been a farmer for over 30 years now but started beans cultivation in the dry season only about five years ago when he noticed that the 3 to 5 seeds planted by his children at home during the dry […]

Conducting this reporter round his irrigated beans farm in Hadejia, Malam Musa Siri-Siri said he has been a farmer for over 30 years now but started beans cultivation in the dry season only about five years ago when he noticed that the 3 to 5 seeds planted by his children at home during the dry season gave good yield.
“My children planted the beans near the pot we usually drink water from. When we drink water, we will throw what was left in the cup on the plant. I was surprised, the beans produced very well. Before then, I used to grow guinea corn and millet or maize every wet season for our consumption at home; then tomatoes and pepper during irrigation for sale to make money.
“On the discovery that beans could be cultivated under irrigation, that year I planted beans thinking I was going to be the first farmer to irrigate beans in Hadejia. But some farmers that saw me working in my beans farm, told me of two other beans farms started about a year or two before mine. But the general belief was that beans and groundnuts cannot be grown through irrigation.
“What I have even discovered is that I got better yield from my irrigated beans farm compared to the beans I cultivate during the dry season. We are close to eight now in Hadejia that are irrigating beans. Another advantage we have with the irrigation of beans is that we have very few insects around during the dry season. You know, during the rainy season, insects move about because the rain forces them out of their holes onto the plants,” he said.
At Hinna in Gombe State, Alhaji Aliyu Usman Gwani, a staff of the Government Vocational Training Centre, Hinna, said he started cultivating groundnuts during the dry season out of curiosity, adding, “When you mention that you want to irrigate groundnuts to any farmer, the response is that you do not try it because it will never grow in the dry season. The irony is that nobody will tell you that he tried it and that it did not grow.
“One day I said look, let me plant groundnut in the school premises and irrigate it then see what will happen. When I planted, even some of our students were coming to tell me, Malam, groundnut does not grow during the dry season. This will be the third year now I will be harvesting my irrigated groundnut with very good yield. When my colleagues saw how good my irrigated groundnut has been, some teachers also joined in the dry season production of groundnuts.
“Even our students have also planted groundnuts in the school farm this dry season. These three groundnut farms you are seeing here, one belongs to me, the other one to a female staff while that last one is the school farm which is planted and maintained by the students. I am sure as time goes on, other farmers will soon commence the cultivation of groundnut in the dry season because so many farmers are coming around to see our farms,” said.
Mrs Amina Muhammad Magaji is a teacher in the school who said she commenced the irrigation farming of groundnuts when she saw the good yield from the one started by Alhaji Gwani and that the first one she harvested gave her very good yield.
She said though the school is yet to be formally incorporated into the federal government’s School Agricultural Programme, “we are giving agriculture a lot of priority because Governor Ibrahim Dankwambo has urged everybody in Gombe State to go to farm and farmers in the state are getting a lot of assistance from the state government.”
The Government Vocational Training Centre also has an orchard of about 500 mango trees comprising of Julie and Mayer varieties donated to it by former Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria and Gombe State University respectively, Prof Abdullahi Mahdi.