Read full article By Fatima Muktar @ Premium Times Photo Credit: Premium Times
This crop which grows tall like corn in the tropics is used for a lot more than just meal for humans. It serves as feed also for livestock and can be processed as ethanol.
Sorghum, a principal source of energy, protein, vitamins and minerals in Nigeria, rarely gets the desired attention from the government, leading many farmers to devise their coping strategies to mitigate post-harvest losses.
This crop which grows tall like corn in the tropics is used for a lot more than just meal for humans. It serves as feed also for livestock and can be processed as ethanol.
Post-harvest losses, which comes in the form of degradation in the quality and quantity of the crop, has become a big problem for sorghum farmers for several years. With the lack of investment in this area of agriculture, the farmers are left to their own devices.
Atrogor Ijeh, the founder of Latent Farms in Cross River State, explained how farmers of sorghum have been managing to remain in business.
“Initially, we had challenges of rodents and weevils, but with the cluster of farmers in the association, the market is now created for us. There is usually an off-taker for the produce. So, as soon as we harvest, which starts from November, the harvest is normally taken by the cluster head or a local government coordinator to the aggregation centre where it is aggregated and bagged, kept in large numbers ready for the off-taker to carry. In that respect, we are not having many losses,” he said.
Mr Ijeh said they were initially threshing manually from the farm gate, and in the course of doing that, a lot of the product would be a loss. But he said the association has now introduced threshing machines to clusters of sorghum farmers which makes it easy. He said with the intervention of the association, the loss is being minimised to a reasonable extent.
Another sorghum farmer, Goni Adam, who is the Borno State chairman of the National Association of Sorghum Producers Processors and Marketers of Nigeria (NASPPAM), said despite the insurgency and the challenge it poses on food production, they have not witnessed much of post-harvest losses in the state.
He said in the 27 local government areas of Borno State, the association has a warehouse in each of the local government, thereby making it easy for the farmers to store their produce and mitigate post-harvest losses.
Ibrahim Yusuf, a sorghum farmer and founder of Auwzak Farms with over 30 years of experience, said due to the lack of modern technology to preserve the product, he usually complements it by grinding the stalk so it can be used for animal feeds.
The national president of the National Association of Sorghum Producers Processors and Marketers of Nigeria (NASPPAM), Muhammad Maina, said the association is working hard to reduce post-harvest losses of sorghum farmers.
“We are taking measures for it. We had trained our farmers on post-harvest losses with the Agriculture Research institute on how to preserve sorghum using chemicals that are not harmful to human beings. With the ministry of agriculture, we get some silos to keep it, so we don’t lose the quality of the sorghum,” he said.
Mr Babayo said the opportunities of Sorghum are enormous from producers, processors, and marketers
