By John Ogunlela
Agriculture became instinctive to man as soon as he passed the hunter-gatherer stages of its pre-historical development. It became quite natural for him to sow seeds in expectation of a harvest and this transformed into a set of knowledge and skills we call agriculture.
The main body of that knowledge and skills has undergone major transformations across the centuries to various extents in different societies and climatic regions. In our environment, however, our practice of agriculture has hardly evolved above the stages of instincts – of the simple practice of planting according to the season and waiting for a harvest. We need to build over this and upgrade with serious planning and employ modern means and come up to Agriculture by Strategy – the burden of this essay. The main reason to involve strategy in agriculture is to increase yield, reduce losses, balance the economies of farming inputs with yield and conserve the soil, atmospheric and water resources in taking care of the environment.
In agriculture, without a strategy, people till the soil for survival and usually for want of what to do. Their practice is simple and their plot of an average size, usually 2 acres – or 8100 square meters, according to widespread and reliable studies. Such practices also call for, or at least have led to farmers raising large families so that wives and children can be available for affordable labour. The practices of such simple farmers in Nigeria is about planting at the onset of the rains, weeding appropriately and realising a typical harvest. Usually, some of the harvest is saved for planting during the next season. The income from this type of farming is mostly food and then some cash to meet up with basic needs and provide the cheapest education for the farmer’s large family. This continued to be the case until cocoa came from Brazil to southern Nigeria and farmers began to realise significant cash incomes and build savings and their work began to positively impact even government earnings through taxation in pre-independent Nigeria. This period marked the apogee of farming without strategy in Nigeria and that age has since passed due to a raft of reasons mostly around global demographic changes and evolution in the structure of needs. To return agriculture to such levels of profitability, we must formulate and implement strategy.
The primary purpose of agriculture is to increase yield to the maximum such that market demand is satisfied and a good life is secured for the farmer. There are a number of ways to increase yield but one is basic – the ability to plant off season. This ability or strategy is created mostly by preparing to water the plants by means other than natural precipitation. This strategy is called irrigation and it makes a whole lot of difference in what comes out for the farmer at harvest or at the end of the year. Irrigation is a primary strategy farmers have adopted for ages for multiplying harvest for crops that are not responsive to other seasonal factors and it holds the key to improving on crop yields in Nigeria today.
Irrigation addresses two things:
i. It enables off-season farming and
ii. It nurtures crops in season to increase yield.
