Farmers in the Tolon District have lauded Ghana Youth Guide for successfully organizing a stakeholders engagement meeting for small scale farmers in the district on climate smart agriculture.
The farmers expressed their appreciation to Ghana Youth Guide after they were educated by the District Agric Director, Mr. Basit Zakari on modern farming techniques to adopt to meet the changes in climate at a stakeholders engagement meeting held on Thursday, 3rd April, 2024. The program held at the Tolon community center was organized by Ghana Youth Guide with funding support by the Civil Society in Development (CISU) and with the technical support from DIB former Danish International Human Settlement.
Expressing their appreciation to Ghana Youth Guide one of the farmers, Ahassan Mahamudu thanked Ghana Youth Guide and its partners for organinzing the stakeholders engagement and emphasized that with some financial support they will be able to apply the knowledge learnt from the training to their farming activities.
He called on government to urgently work on the district warehouse to prevent post-harvest loses and further proposed that the district agric office deploy some of their staff to constantly monitor their farms to ensure productive farming.
Iddrisu Salima who was also a participant in her remarks also thanked the organizers and revealed that in her first farming of 2 acres, she got 33 bags but it has declined drastically within 12 years due to the continues use of the same seedlings over the years, so, she advised her colleague farmers to comply with the teachings of the Agric director by not sticking to the same seedlings continuously over a period of time.
Mr. Yussif indicated the knowledge gained from the engagement will impact their farming positively.
” We are very grateful to Ghana Youth Guide for this knowledge impactful engagement. To me, it is important to gain knowledge before any financial assistance because if you get financial assistance without the necessary knowledge and skills to farm, the money will finish and not make any impact”. Mr. Yussif said.
According to him, as farmers who solely rely on rains for farming, they want to be doing all year farming and called on government and NGOs to give them proper irrigation dams for farming in the dry season.
Ghana Youth Guide is currently implementing a nine month program entitled Strengthening Ghanaian Youth Through Climate Smart Agriculture and Civic Organizing. The project is implemented in Tolon and Savelugu districts in the Northern region.
In all, fifty (50) small scale farmers comprising women, men and the disabled will benefit from the climate smart agriculture program.
