A fellow at Soya Innovation Lab in collaboration with Savannah Agriculture Research Institute, George Awuni has charged farmers in Northern Ghana, particularly soybean farmers to adopt modern technology such as the use of herbicides in order to improve upon crop yield.
Speaking on the sidelines of a press conference held in Tamale to educate farmers on the benefits of farming soybeans, he indicated that it was imperative for soybean farmers to wholly take up the use of herbicides since the majority of the country’s active labor force have an indifferent attitude towards the production of soybeans; thereby rendering it a preserve of women and children.
“The use of herbicides is very very important because if you look at agriculture these days, labor is very hard to get, and even when you get the labor, the category of people that are prepared to get into agricultural labor are the women and the children,” he stated.
Mr. Awuni explained that the use of herbicides in farming was crucial in solving the scarcity of labor and thus urged farmers to heartily welcome it.
He stated that the use of this innovation was pretty cost-effective as it affords both children and women the opportunity to attend school and perform other important roles respectively.
“Women essentially have a lot of things to do in their hands already and children are supposed to be getting to school. So, what we are saying is that instead of human labor in agriculture now, what don’t we get into herbicides to solve all these? At the soybean innovation standpoint, we think that getting into using post-emergent herbicides will help reduce cost. It is cheap as compared to labor, it saves women from going with children to the farm,” he added.
Mr. Awuni went on to disclose that there was a significant harvest of soybeans this year compared to the previous years, which he believes was highly attributable to the use of herbicides this year.
He thus encouraged farmers in all the five regions of the north to totally embrace soybeans farming as it was highly nutritious.
Soya Innovation Lab is the only organization mandated to do Soybean development across Africa and some other developing countries.
Source|A1Radioonline.com|101.1 MHz|Elijah Beyeni Yenibey|Ghana
