Agriculture: A Rejected Stone

By KHADIJAT, Yusuf:

The good old memories of yesterday in the farm are sumptuous in the mind. Imagine having a hectare of land with a greener pasture that is well cultivated where tubers of yam are countless, heap of maize in manifold and lots of vegetables prominent on the farmland.  No wonder people of the olden days lives longer than we are now, how would you feel having everything to eat in fresh condition? The freshness of this farm produce tells much on their state of health!

Before now, the government of the day knew the importance of producing in large numbers of food for the consumption of the masses and by that, we had the ‘OPERATION FEED THE NATION’ era in  the late 70s by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. As at then, farmers were significantly buoyant financially, as they sell the farm produce to the government after harvest and also, have enough to fend for their families, both immediate and extended ones.

It would be recalled that it was during this era that farmers sells cocoa, cotton and rubber in large quantity to the government for finished product, looking at the scenario critically, it’s a game of ‘merry go round’ because it comes from the farmer to the government and back to the farmer, since they are also part of the masses who constitute the end- users of the product.

If asked, what is the state of agriculture in our country? What should be the answer to it? It’s a thing of the past. We have it so bad that only very few percent of farmers produce for the nation, but then, can we now deduce this out of civilization? How has it stop people from farming? Is the land no longer fertile for farming? Are farmers lacking supplements to their production? These and many more are questions of the day.

Well, it is good news for the nation that ‘the rejected stone now turn a cornerstone’. The present administration of Muhammadu Buhari has embrace tuning back to agriculture as source of generating the country’s income to salvage the ugly situation of malnutrition amidst the country with a more sophisticated mechanized farm tools, by this, Nigerian should be hopeful that ‘Things will Fall Apart’ for the betterment of the country.