The need to empower Nigerian farmers with the right knowledge

Try to imagine 80 million people packing the Abuja national stadium, throughout the street and the city, across the bridges, down on the highways.

 

It's hard to imagine but these are the people who will not get enough to eat today, these are the people on the brink of starvation.

And what we don't realize is that our prospects of being able to address this challenge are getting worst and if the Nigerian farmers are unable to make a significant change, the situation could be getting far worst. Let me explain why.

The population of Nigeria is on track to go from 200 million today to over 500 million by 2050. In addition, each living person in Nigeria is on track to consume more than 30% more calories as we see a continued shift towards more diversified protein heavy diets. You add these together and what this tells us is that WE (Nigerian farmers) are going to need to produce more than 50% more food if these trends continue.

In other words, demand will be going up. But on other hand our (Nigerian farmers) ability to increase supply is going down. The result of this is a sharp increase in price that will hit the most vulnerable people on earth as it in this country Nigeria where people spend over 70% of their income on food.

We need to be able to increase the productivity of the lands that we are already farming.

Africa has the largest arable land mass on the planet; also, the gap between what we are currently producing and what we could be producing off our lands is far greater than anywhere else in the world. 

While the rest of the world has been able to triple the productivity of their land over the last 50 years, agriculture in Africa has remained more or less stagnant. Why is this? What is this mystery as to why Africa has remained stock in time while the rest of the world has progressed productivity. A lack of progress in this area has not been for lack of trying. 100s of billions of dollars have been spent over decades on aids, on new technology, on new programs with little success. Why is this? 

The subsidies alone are unable to create an efficient set of practices and what happens is that the grower ends up applying far too much fertilizer or not enough and when those subsidies eventually go away they are unable to continue those practices as they are inefficient and not sustainable. 

A recent world bank study looked at an extensive exhaustive view of what is it that is holding back progress in African agriculture and they cited as a prime example of governments inability to put crucial information in the hands of the farmers, to really empower each farmer to make the right decision about their fields for their farms and put them in the driver’s seat to drive those changes. 

So if this is so crucial to being able to impact change, why have we not been able to make more progress in this area?

The answer starts with understanding the soil. If you look at the nutrients in the soil it is the same way as we think about the food that allows us to grow from children to healthy adults; it acts much in the same way. It fuels the growth of those crops and without it crops see the same impact as humans; stunted growth, malnutrition and starvation.

In Nigeria the average farmer applies less than 1/100 the nutrients to the soil as in the developed world this in combination with the fact that crop practices like crop rotation which naturally replenish nutrient in the soil are vastly under adopted, meaning that these farmers are farming off depleted soil which has no chance of being able to use their full productivity.

I assume you are a farmer reading this, you farm one field that is not bigger than a football pitch, and that field provides the entire livelihood for your family year in year out. Now each year you are faced with an impossible decision; do you invest everything that you have, all of your money, potentially going further into debt into investing in fertilizer that you have no visibility into whether or not that will lead to greater prosperity for you or just put you further into depth. To make matters worse, if you are to make that purchase you have no way of knowing how much to apply to that field. 

Why is this such a complex problem? 

The very ability of the soil from one field to the next, the variable that you see in weather from year to year and the crops that are planted means that the difference in the optimal amount of fertilizer to put on your field can vary three to four times from one field to next, from one year to the next, and so, as a farmer you have no way to put together this complex variables and to come to a solution and as a result, you stick to the practices that you know, you fall back to what is familiar and even if you know that the outcome is barely enough  to feed your family much less supply your community, that is what u will return to.

Now I want you to imagine for a moment that you have a tool in your hand and the tool already knows the details of your field, it knows about your soil, knows about the weather you have experienced and it knows about the crops you have planted or are going to plant. And this tool can tell you the benefits of those decisions that you are trying to make. It can help solve that impossible question of whether or not to plant a specific crop, how much to apply and it is that information, that confidence that it gives you that allows you to get over that hump and make a new decision, adopt a new practice and really start to impact change in a sustainable way.

If this information is so important in the hands of farmers why has the Nigerian government not provided us with this information?

Well, the building blocks that are needed to make this solution a reality have just started coming together in the past few years.

We have seen an explosion in the ability to run complex computation, a hundred times increase in computer power, the development of cloud computing technology that allows us to do calculations across thousands of machines and turn that back into a single answer.

In addition, the world is becoming digitized. Man knows more about the land that he cultivates then he ever had in the past. New satellite data, weather data, digitization of the soil, new sensors on the farm; these have all given man a better understanding of the interactions between crops, weather and soil than the world has ever seen before. And finally Mobile Technology. 

So all these mountain of data, all these computational power is worthless unless the Nigerian government can turn it into a simple actionable solution in the hands of we the farmers. If the government can do that via the technology that we (farmers) already have and that we already understand how to use, then that's when REAL CHANGE begin to be impacted. 

This is the time for the Nigerian government to put the pieces together and create a holistic solution that empower the Nigerian farmers to take action and to make the right decisions that's when I believe we can have a true solution.

I believe that with the right information in our hands we the Nigerian farmers can reverse the trends of increase in starvation and decrease in productivity.

If the government can put together the right resources where they are needed the most, with every farmer in every field, in every village.