RICE FARMERS in Navrongo and Fumbisi in the Kassena-Nankana and Builsa District respectively are appealing to the government to provide them with combined harvesters to harvest their rice.
A representative of the farmers on the Board of the Irrigation Company of Upper East Region (ICOUR), Ahmed Bogobiri, made the call at a meeting in Tono near Navrongo where rice farmers who were working on the various plots around the Tono Irrigation project had met to find solutions to their problems.
Mr. Bogobiri noted that most farmers in the area were likely to loss most of their rice grains due to long delay in harvesting.
“In this modern day, where competition in the rice market is high, the commodity is better harvested with a combined harvester. Unfortunately, we in the Upper East region do not have this very important machine,” he added.
He revealed that rice farmers largely depend on manual harvesting, which is mainly done by women, noting that the women were also busy on their farms.
This year, many farmers cultivated a new variety of rice that was introduced by the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute and New Rice for Africa (NERICA).
The new variety has a good yielding capability and matures between 60 and 70 days.
The farmers explained that the good weather conditions and favourable rainfall pattern that characterised this year's farming season had benefited them greatly but “there were no combined harvesters for immediate harvesting of the crop.”
Mr. Bogobiri said, “The rice stocks are now touching the water beneath and have started rotting.”
The Upper East Regional Minister, Mark Owen Woyongo, in an exclusive interview with CITY&BUSINESS GUIDE said, “Government had purchased some combined harvesters and would soon allocate them to the rice farmers in the regions as part of its promise to farmers in the Upper East region and other regions.”
He called on the rice farmers to make use of the available means to harvest the rice in order to avoid total loss.
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