Planting initiative to hire 1,000 adults to boost rice cultivation
A new rice planting initiative (wet season) capable of engaging 1,000 women and youths in agriculture is in the offing.
The rice project will empower clusters of women and youths agripreneur by farming together on a contiguous arable farmland to produce high quality and quantity of rice paddy for processing during this year’s wet season in the country.
Project Coordinator, Fevick Resources, Samuel Oluwafemi Adeshina, told journalists in Abuja that the new wet season rice farming project would link farmers to new technologies and high yield seedlings. He said the new rice planting initiative would create employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for 1,000 women and youths in the pilot phase.
“They will produce high quality and quantity of paddy rice for processors to get high milling outturned which will increase the profit margin of the women and youths.
“We can derive six to seven metric tonne of rice per hectare by introducing new varieties of very high yielding seedlings.
“This variety of rice seedlings will be tested to determine the ruggedness, virility and flood resistance of the variety that was developed to see how this variant of rice will survive in submerged areas during serious flood and ozone depletion,” he added.
According to him, Taraba State is hosting the pilot programme and the farmers, under Fevick Resource supervision, will have three layers of credit open to them.
“There is the direct fertiliseer aspect, which will give the farmers NPK and UREA (fertilizer), there is also the the seeds variety Faro 66 and 67, the third part of the credit to the farmers is the Crop Protection Product (CPP), which is the aspect that covers labour and services,” Adeshina said, adding that this will cover “land preparation, harvesting, threshing and aggregation.”
The project will create strong and effective linkages to quality agro-inputs and services including mechanization, credits, insurance, technology, information, and market for rural farmers to improve their livelihoods and build sustainable agriculture.
He said: “Participants will be selected and clustered as a registered geo-cooperative having its own corporate governance structure on contiguous farmland. They will be ultimately responsible for supervising, managing their respective plots as well as working together as a geo-cooperative.”
