How Jephtah made 38% profit from cucumber farm in 12 months
Jephtah Omavuega is a young vegetable farmer and has three hectares of cucumber and cassava. Jephtah started at a very tender age. This is not surprising because his parents are farmers, a factor that made him developed love for agriculture early in life. After his graduation from the university, Jephtah picked up a teaching job to raise capital for his farm project. After two years in the teaching profession, he was able to get enough money to buy inputs and lease land for the project.
“I started my farming business with N200,000 last year and I have made over 38 percent profit margins. This year alone, I have harvested my cucumber three times. It takes forty-five days to plant cucumber and harvest it,” he tells Start-Up Digest.
He believes that Nigerian youths are not finding agriculture attractive because they are yet to see anything on ground that would attract them to agribusiness.
“Farmers in the rural areas engaged in agriculture are very poor because most of them do not get any value addition since the whole primary production is entangled with poverty, with the issue of low productivity and high time spent on farmlands. This makes youths, including those that studied courses on agriculture, not to take it as a profession.
He says that the crude way of farming in the country is another reason why youths do not find agriculture attractive. He calls on the government to develop mechanisation and give the youth access to land, stressing that this will make agriculture attractive to the young population.
“We need innovation to do farming differently from the older generation who were mostly entangled in poverty,” he says.
“Some of my friends I tell about my profit margins want to go into farming but cannot access land,” he says.
“No youth wants to go to the rural areas to take up farming because the infrastructure there is poor. The government must provide key infrastructural facilities so that the youth can take up agric as a profession,” he admonishes.
However, he believes that there is something to gain from agribusiness.
He adds that the youth need mechanisation and can easily embrace innovative ways of agriculture if there is finance, infrastructure and a guaranteed market for their produce.
On government’s economic diversification plan, Jephtah says there must first be agricultural revolution without which the sector cannot earn the much needed foreign exchange for the country through export.
“If the government just sits down and keeps talking without addressing the structural problems, then the sector will not play the leading role,” he states.
He says the government must dialogue with the private sector to find better ways of mechanising rural farmers, how to improve high yield inputs, how to improve fertilizers, how best farmers can harvest, how to guarantee economic value to primary producers, and guaranteed market for agricultural produce. We have been talking about diversification through agriculture for a very long time but nothing to show for it.
Josephine Okojie