‘We’re helping tomato farmers reduce post-harvest loses’

  How long have you been on ground in Kano? We have started the pilot project for about twelve months now. We are just one year old, we started in three local governments in Kano: Bunkure, Kura and Garum Mallam. Now we have expanded to nine LGAs in Kano State adding six more local governments; […]

 

How long have you been on ground in Kano?

We have started the pilot project for about twelve months now. We are just one year old, we started in three local governments in Kano: Bunkure, Kura and Garum Mallam. Now we have expanded to nine LGAs in Kano State adding six more local governments; but also we are expanding to two additional states- Kaduna and Jigawa and later to additional four states.

 

How do you help farmers deal with issues of glut, diseases and post-harvest loses in tomato production?

You know the project is supposed to be a catalyst and a facilitator by linking some of these issues that you identified with solutions. We are doing that through five key components of farmer training and aggregation, access to timely and affordable financing, linkages to markets, access to post harvest loss reduction and disease management technology as well as through policy and enabling environment.  What we are doing in the first year of our pilot program was to partner with Dangote as our major anchor partner that would uptake the tomatos that are coming from the farms. So Dangote at that time before even production started has offered to buy tomato at N1, 200 per basket and he had being buying at the same price even when there was glut when tomato was about N200 to N300 in the market, he was buying at N1, 200. A lot of farmers beyond even the Yieldwise farmers benefited from this during glut. We are hoping going forward this will be enhanced and other serious processors like Ikara etc will provide good price to smallholders farmers and markets for tomato to boost local processing and reduce loss.

 

Do you provide financial assistance to research institutes to do this or what role are you playing in linking this farmers and research institutes? 

We are not like some donor agencies that gives handouts, we are catalyst and invest more in working in partnership to provide solutions. We are convinced that the capacity and capability exists within most Nigerian institutions.  At the initial phase when we do some of this piloting, Pyxera Global did provide some funding to smallholder farmers who are majorly our primary partners to pilot the use of technology such as crates and see how they build interest and invest for sustainability. We are here to see what we can do to increase smallholder farmer incomes, change their lives and to be able to see how food security is ensured by reducing post-harvest loss using tomato value chain as an example and hopefully this can lead to learning and replication in other value chain. We are also working on creating  access to timely and affordable finance through the Bank of Agric’s Anchor Borrowers’ scheme in the first phase we piloted with about 100 farmers, right now the Kano State sovernment, BOA and Dangote we are targeting to get about 5000 farmers tomato on board.

 

 What has the programme achieved so far?

To be honest to you, I think some of the impact that we have been able to achieve in one year right is that the farmer is now being able to quantify loss in money terms and they are becoming more efficient in their decision making. We have been able to find alternative markets for example like during the rainy season when the factory is not processing, hotels, grocery stores, super markets, fresh markets middleman are linking and buying directly with the farmer cooperatives. We have been able to identify more than ten alternative large volume markets across Abuja, Lagos and Kano; they are up taking tomatoes that are coming from the rain fed farming.