The resolve of the Oyo State government to ensure food sufficiency in the state has started yielding results with the harvest of thousands of catfish nursed to maturity by students of the Science Secondary School, Pade, Ibadan, in a pilot study preparatory to the introduction of school agriculture programme. Dare Adekanmbi witnessed the harvest period. His report.EXPERTS in the agricultural sector have identified the ageing farming population as one of the factors militating against food security in the nation. The average age of the current farming population is about 69 years and farmers in this category are responsible for the production of 1.52 metric tonnes of cassava, 778,000 tonnes of yams and other food and cash crops in the country.The reason for this, according to agriculture experts, is the unattractive nature of agriculture and the perception of farming as an activity that is the exclusive preserve of the poor, so much so that unless farming is made attractive to youths, the current food insecurity crisis in the nation would get worse and the nation's socio-economic fabric further threatened.But not wanting to wait for the gloomy consequence of this development, the Oyo State government, through its Ministry of Agriculture, came up with a policy that would not only re-populate the farmers in the state but would also increase the production of food for the sustenance of its citizens as well as for export in order to earn foreign exchange. The paradigm shift policy is called school agricultural programme of Oyo State.According to the state Commissioner for Agriculture, Mr Abimbola Kolade, 'the objective is to bring back the interest of young people to agriculture. We also want to bring into them enterprise in agriculture. Our people have seen agriculture as a family lifestyle and because of that none of them is into full time commercial farming. But while agriculture seems to be unattractive to many people is the fact that everybody sees it as a poor man's business. 'But there is a lot of opportunity, not only in agricultural produce but much more in value chain addition to agriculture. This is why we want to address the problem of the old age bracket that we have in agriculture. That is why the present administration has come up with the school agriculture programme to bring it back to life so that young people can be introduced early into the business of agriculture and agricultural enterprise. To test-run the programme before extending it to other secondary schools in the state, Mr Kolade explained that the School of Science, Pade, in the outskirts of Ibadan city, was chosen for the pilot study because it already had a fish pond in place. Under the pilot study, the students, through the Ministry of Agriculture, in August this year, took delivery of about 7,500 fingerlings to nurture them to maturity, supervised by the school's head of Department of Agriculture and officials of the ministry.All the students, on rotational basis, took turns to bridge the gap between the theoretical aspects of agriculture being drilled into them by their teachers and the practical dimensions by spending between 30 minutes and an hour feeding and attending to the needs of the small fish until they were mature for harvest.According to the commissioner, 'the response and interest of these young people have been so highly encouraging to us. We started with the fingerlings and we taught these students to raise the fish up to table production. Since our focus is value addition to agriculture, we are not going to sell the fish fresh like this as staple food. We will take them to Ministry of Agriculture.'Hopefully we will like to have synergy with most of the students to be here to see the process because that is where we have the oven where it will be dried and parked for sale. The dried fish are very clean without stone and an equivalent of fresh catfish that sells for between N300 and N350 will be sold for about N1, 000 and it can last two weeks on the shelf without adding any preservatives,' he said.While demonstrating what they had learnt in theory and practice, two of the Senior Secondary School III students, Atanda Ganiyat and Abiodun Salami said they had been able to understand the importance of the quality and quantity of water to fish-farming as well as the types of fish ponds. The students, however, solicited more facilities like earthen pond to enable them study the fish in their natural habitat as well as their sexing.They were full of praise to Governor Ajimobi for the choice of their school as a centre for the experimentation.Earlier in his welcome address, the principal of the School of Science, Pade, Pastor James Oladele, described the project as an answered prayer. He explained that he offered two key prayer points to God in Israel while on holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year, namely that God should dry up the nation's crude oil so that government at all levels would look up to agriculture as the mainstay of the nation's economy and also endorse the election of an agriculture-friendly governor for the state, which latter prayer, he said was answered with the election of Senator Abiola Ajimobi as the state governor in the last April polls.The principal charged the students to further key into the opportunity that the programme afforded them, while urging the state government to help fence off the school with a view to warding off the invasion of the premises by goats and other intruders. He added that the vast arable land in the school would be cultivated to make more food available to the state by the students, if the fencing was done, a request that was further underscored by the chairman of the Parents-Teachers Association in the school.The commissioner, who assured them that the request would be looked into by the ministry and the state executive council, pointed out that the Governor Ajimobi-led administration was working tirelessly to create an atmosphere where the people of the state could be the best that they wanted to be. He revealed that a comprehensive agriculture plan that would see farm settlements refurbished and renamed as agriculture estate to erase negative perception had been factored into the 2012 budget of the state. The estates, according to him, would be equipped with the trappings of modern society like the internet and satellite facilities to attract the youth.He stated further that most of the foreign investors received into the state by Governor Ajimobi had indicated interest in the agriculture sector because they had seen the seriousness of the governor and his team towards agricultural revolution in the state. The commissioner added that transportation, packaging, production of storage facilities and value additions to agriculture produce were some of the vast opportunities opened to investors in the sector.With the success of this scheme and its planned replication in all the senior schools, the Oyo State government seems to have realised that a strong and an efficient agricultural sector would enable the state, nay the country to feed its growing population, generate employment, earn foreign exchange and provide raw materials for industries.
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