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Farmers in the Bono East capital, Techiman, have resorted to opting for inorganic fertilizers instead of organic fertilizers for farming.
Despite the increased sales of inorganic fertilizers in these hard times, they believe that the inorganic manures yield better than organic farming.
Some of these farmers include Selina Antwi, a vegetable farmer who confirmed that she has a technical know-how of using the organic fertilizers in farming, yet she prefers the inorganic manures.
That notwithstanding, the decision for going with the ‘inorganic’ advocacy is as a result that farming with inorganic fertilizers requires a lot of resources and energy in making ready lands, also it is time-consuming.
“Inorganic fertilizers are the best. Organic farming is very stressful and time-consuming. You will need to use tractors to dig up the land before applying them which makes the work difficult,” she mentioned.
While some may not have the knowledge in application of the organic manures, they besought that education should be speedily high on that note.
Other vegetable farmers, Simon Asare who strictly opposed the practice of organic farming urged that the government should not consider pushing it
However, the farmers urged that the government support them with loans and organic composts for farming.
“We are asking the government to help us. Whether it is assisting us to get loans from the banks or still giving us subsidies on the fertilizers. This will help us grow more food crops. Even with a subsidy, a bag of fertilizer costs GH₵320. Without the subsidy, we are buying it at GH₵380 so the difference is small. This does not help us,” Mr. Asare pleaded.
Mr. Simon Asare also revealed the challenges faced by farmers in the choice of pesticides, weedicides and other chemicals they use in farming. They complained of the drastic changes and increment in the prices of chemicals.
“After the fertilizer, you need to buy fungicide to help control fungi on the farms, and pesticides to control pests. Prices of these products have shot up. We used to buy Lambda insecticide at GH₵18, but it’s now GH₵30.
“To make it worse, there are lots of sub-standard farm chemicals on the market because the original products are expensive, and farmers opt for the cheap products because they cannot afford the originals,”.
