AGRICULTURE AND FINANCE; A MARRIAGE OR A SHAM

Agro-business

It is beyond crucial that man has food to eat; its importance cannot be over-emphasized. Food sustains our very existence and ultimately, does agriculture.

Terms such as “Agro-business” or “Agricultural Finance” are not new to us, they have been discussed, deliberated upon and dissected with little or no tangible results, even if these terms are new, it can be quickly pieced together to go with agriculture and finance. A marriage of the two sectors.

Agricultural Finance refers to the acquisition of financial services such as; loans, leases, insurance of crop and/or livestock, it covers the whole agricultural processes of input supply, production, distribution and marketing. Agricultural practitioners and Farmers are expected to make use of the opportunities Agricultural Financing provides but how easy is it to access these opportunities and are they truly helpful to farmers?
The co-owner of Eltoda Farms, Mrs. Toyin Falade, opens up on her experiences as a Farmer and her challenges with agricultural finance.

Eltoda farms, majorly dealing in livestock farming (poultry) and aquaculture, have been running for 14years, Mrs. Falade in partnership with her husband runs the marketing aspect while he runs the production.

As regards the funding of the farm, she said “finance is important in agriculture; however it is not the most important thing, passion first. When we decided we wanted to go into Agriculture, we had so many challenges; we were losing money every day but passion kept us. The funds are not forthcoming as they ought to be from financial institutions considering the importance of agriculture to life”.

According to her, “most banks do not fully understand the need of an average farmer, what they do is sympathize with us but they do not empathize with us. They have no understanding of what we are faced with. You cannot just sit in the four walls of your office and draw up packages for a farmer without being on the farm to know what our needs are. They have no fair idea and come up with a lot of impossible criteria, far-fetched collaterals. They keep saying when you give a farmer a loan; they will go and marry a second wife”

Mrs. Falade further explained how the funds can be utilized if they were given to farmers and how technology has made farming easier, more efficient, increased speed, better output and made agriculture a fun thing to do.

“Currently, our farm is operating on a semi-automated system, but there are a lot of achievements we could have done if we were operating on a fully automated system. There are fully automated cages where the feeding system, drinking system and manure system are all automated. For instance, I have a three tier cage, and I noticed that on a particular side the birds are doing better and producing more than on the other side, that is because they are being fed by different people.

“The birds faring better, are being fed by a tall attendant and so he could dispense better on the topmost layer while the other birds are being fed by a average height attendant who cannot reach them. Also, no matter how skilled a person is, there would still be wastages. These are as a result of things done manually, if we had a device and the attendants input a figure to feed a 100,000 birds, it is the exact figure put in that would be delivered.

“This minimizes wastages and ensures efficiency. We need funds to acquire machines, if we had the machines, we would be more productive. Banks are not being helpful; they are looking for their own comfort in the form of collateral. I believe if banks seriously co-partnered with farmers, things will no longer be treated casually” She explained.

Speaking on the role being played by the government, the co-owner of Eltoda Farms stated that, “the government is very far from the farmers. We forget that Nigeria is a highly consuming nation, we do very little of production and hardly export. Focusing our attention solely on oil exploration, as a Nation, there are other ways we can grow and agriculture is a high employer of labour.

“If an average family is self-sufficient regarding their feeding, other issues become minimal. The reason people commit all sort of atrocities at times is because they cannot bear to see their family go hungry.” She continued “the government has been looking elsewhere, putting so much money into oil exploration and telecommunications with very little attention to agriculture. The government of Nigeria should go back to times we had initiatives such as; Operation Feed the Nation, as a Country, we need to be self-sufficient at least when it comes to our food.”

Advising the government, Mrs. Falade said she believes the government should be more involved in agriculture, re-instating that nobody can live without food, “the community in which our farm is located do not have electricity but it is still existing, but the community could never have survived without food. The government is cutting off the subsidy on fuel and people are still surviving, this subsidy should be for farm produces instead.”

She also mentioned the non-availability of regulatory bodies for agricultural products. “In my experience with poultry, business men bring in chicks; parent stocks from who knows where, but because there are no standards, no body to check if the chicks meet the criteria before they sell out, we get bad deals.”

The co-owner of Eltoda farms further lamented that oftentimes farmers ‘burn their fingers’ in investments without any form of profit to show forth, “having fed the chicks for 20 or 21 weeks, expecting them to lay eggs, you will realize the chicks are not healthy”.

“We do not have government cover. If you sell bad chicks to me and there is a body I can report to, and you would have to return part of my money or anything, then you will be more careful next time.”

She also gave examples of times when she had gotten vaccines for her hens, which was supposed to maintain a ‘cold chain’ hence it loses potency, only for it to cause a relapse in the hen, “they sold to us failed vaccines!”

Mrs. Falade pleaded with the government to protect farmers and the banks should also be willing to help by getting more involved in the processes of agriculture, “they should visit our farms, speak with us and know what we are faced with in order to be able to offer us something beautiful for an average farmer.”