Marginalised farmers in Ejura-Sekyedumase have received support from the European Union (EU) ReDIAL project, an initiative on climate-relevant smart development, to boost agricultural activities.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Madam Lambinya Kako, a beans farmer at Ejura in the Ashanti Region, explained that she was a widow with five children, and farming was her only livelihood and source of income for her family.
She has one and half acres of land in the Kasei Farming Zone at Ejura-Sekyedumase in the Ashanti Region and she usually took a minimum of 15 days to thresh, de-husk and winnow her beans with sticks through manual threshing.
Madam Kako said the manual threshing had been the bottleneck in her farming activities as she could not afford the commercial threshing services.
“During the dry season, the beans plants are uprooted before being beaten with sticks thus affecting my overall returns due to high post-harvest losses,” she said.
Through the intervention of the ReDIAL project (Research for Development and Innovation Agriculture and Learning), her threshing activities were taken care of at no cost, she said.
“The threshing of beans was easily carried out irrespective of the state of the beans (uprooted or plugged) thus saving me the stress of the 15 days manual threshing,” Madam Kako said.
She said the entire threshing activities of her uprooted beans were conveniently carried out in approximately four hours, in which she obtained 10 bags of size five sacks.
Madam Kako said that was the first time she saw a highly improved threshing service that did not break the grains, therefore, reducing post-harvest losses compared to the other threshing methods.
“I never dreamt of getting such support from the ReDIAL project and will forever be grateful to them,” she said, indicating that she would increase production in subsequent farming seasons due to the support.
Mr Daniel Owusu, the project officer at Ejura, said several marginalised farmers were unable to access threshing services in the Municipality thus the need to continuously support them, especially women and people with disability, to effectively thresh their produce to sustain agriculture and their livelihoods.
The ReDIAL project sought to transform agriculture through the introduction of multicrop thresher to assist the marginalised to thresh multiple cereals and grains such as maize, cowpea, rice, and beans, he said.
