NIRSAL turns 851 peasants to mechanised farmers in Ogun

The Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) has organised 851 maize, rice and cassava farmers in Ogun State into financeable geo-cooperatives for participation in the 2019 wet season farming under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP).

Subsistent farmers in three local governments of Ewekoro, Yewa North, and Ogun Waterside of the state are to benefit from the mechanised farming initiative, which was flagged off at the weekend.

NIRSAL’s Head of Corporate Communications, Ms. Anne Ihugba, in a statement issued in Abuja, yesterday, said the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through NIRSAL would fund the mechanised farming activities of the affected farmers, in pursuit of the goal of transforming subsistent farmers into mechanised farmers and big players in agribusiness, across the country.

The ABP is an agricultural input-loan scheme of the CBN in which small-holder farmers receive single-digit interest rate loans in the form of inputs and pay back with portions of their produce.

As a participating Financial Institution in the programme, NIRSAL administers the ABP on behalf of CBN.

At the ceremony held at the premises of the Ogun State Agricultural Development Project Office, at the weekend, NIRSAL flagged off the distribution of inputs to the farmers in the presence of several dignitaries.

During the exercise, farmers under Ode-Omi Rice Association, Ogun State Chapter of Nigeria, Cassava Growers’ Association (NCGA), and Business Support Academy (BSA) farmers received pre-emergence herbicides, certified seeds, crop protection products, NPK and Urea.

NIRSAL is also ready to deploy tractors to their farms for mechanisation service in preparation for planting.

The Head of NIRSAL’s Project Monitoring, Reporting and Remediation Office (PMRO) in Ogun State, Mrs. Jumoke Ilo, stated that NIRSAL, through the ABP, was committed to addressing the challenges of smallholder farmers in the state, using its end-to-end approach to agricultural projects which spans the pre-upstream, upstream, midstream and downstream segments of the Agricultural value chain.

She added that, through the ABP, NIRSAL was addressing the problems of access to finance and markets, structuring, low technical know-how and other challenges facing smallholder farmers in the state.

This, Mrs. Ilo said, “was the reason NIRSAL has organised farmers into geo-cooperatives, provided them with finance components & training, and will further link them with off-takers.”

Also speaking at the event, the Permanent Secretary of the Ogun State Ministry of Agriculture, Mrs. Abosede Olaseni Ogunleye, said that NIRSAL’s intervention was in line with the state government’s third cardinal programme of Increased Agricultural Production leading to Industrialisation.

Industrialisation she noted, “can only be achieved by supplanting subsistence farming with mechanized agriculture. The era of using cutlasses and hoes should gradually give way to the use of motorised ploughs and harrows.”