Our improved technologies go beyond Nigerian border says Prof. Falaki IAR boss who spoke with food farm news on why there is separation of 2015 REFIL from Cropping Scheme programme. Read his excerpts below

Congratulation for your award as, the senior fellow by the Agricultural Association Nigeria and can you introduce yourself?

My name is Prof. Mustapha Falaki, currently the Executive Director, Institute for Agricultural Research (IAR) Ahmadu Bello, Zaria.

How do you intend to use this award dawn on you to drive best agricultural practices in Nigeria?

Well this is a high honor conferred on me by the Agricultural Society of  Nigeria, and those of us that are in research are bind to double our effort towards producing more research based technologies for the benefit of our resourced poor farmers. My Institute has mandate for several crops and I can say we have been releasing several varieties of groundnut and sorghum. Recently the ones we have released have even crossed the border to neighbouring countries like Niger, Mali where they are using the same varieties we have released. I think this is great for us as what we are releasing as improved varieties to our farmers are being used in other ecologies of the West Africa sub region countries. We are going to double our effort in this regards. We have gone a long way in our bio-technology programme, we intend very soon to be producing sugar cane seedlings so as to be able to feed the sugar factories like Dangote that is having over twenty thousand hectares in Jigawa, Sokoto and other states. But through bio-technology, we will be using our laboratory in collaboration with the National Sugar Development Council as we want to provide them enough seedlings to produce more sugar cane to be able to provide processed sugar for Nigerians.

I know IAR is very strategic in the effort it has been providing, but how has these technologies transferred to farmers. What are the paradigm shifts you have been able to achieve to ensure transfer of these technologies to farmers?

I can tell you my institute is very close to National Agricultural Research Liaison Extension Services. As a coordinating research institute, we are in charge of seven North Western states of the country. We are making every effort to extend all agricultural based technologies to all our states, and not only that, we are also sourcing technologies from our other sister research institutes that are collaborating to extend our technologies through our farming system.

Can you throw more light into the separation of cropping scheme and REFILS against next year?

Actually we are the only one that has been conducting them jointly but other research institutes have been doing them separately. We thought we should start having them separately because the cropping scheme is usually delaying the REFIL meeting. We have decided to have the Refil earlier next year. The reason why the cropping scheme is delaying the REFIL is because as of now, we have not harvested and processed our data. That is why we are going to have REFIL in January and cropping scheme later because of election maybe March for cropping scheme.www,.foodfarmnews.com