Farming is rewarding - Engineer

An electrical engineer who has taken to farming, Joy Okrah, has called on the youth not to hesitate to venture into farming because there were lots of prospects.

Since venturing into farming in 2019, Ms. Okrah, who is the Chief Executive Office of Awo Fields Limited, said she had not regretted taking up farming as the benefits had been overwhelming.

Awo Fields Limited is into food crop production, input supply and sale of farming equipment such as tractors and shellers.

Field visits

Speaking to the media during a field visit by a team from Absa Bank PLC Ghana to beneficiaries of the Absa Young Africa Works (AYAW) in the Upper West Region, Ms. Okrah asked the youth not to always be focused on white-collar jobs and wait for the government to employ them before making ends meet.

Although she was trained as an electrical engineer, Ms. Okrah said venturing into agriculture had been fulfilling and rewarding.

Employment

Aside from creating employment for people, she has also been able to assist other farmers, particularly women and youth, with farm inputs and also provided a market for those farmers to sell their produce.

Currently, she has six permanent employees and over 100 casual workers who she engaged seasonally to work on her 300-acre farm where she grows rice, soya bean, maize and sorghum and has over 1,500 out-growers.

Game changer

The CEO of Awo Fields Ltd admitted that access to financial support remained a challenge to agricultural production in the country and that she also faced the same challenge.

She said the company had three fields for its activities and at “a point, we nearly gave up two of the fields due to the difficulties in accessing financial support,” she said.

However, she said financial support from the AYAW programme, which was a partnership between Absa Bank and Mastercard Foundation, was the game changer.

She said the facility, which came with an interest rate of 10 per cent, gave the company the opportunity to expand its services and also assisted more farmers to expand their farms and produce more to meet the demands of their clients.

Future plans

Ms. Okrah said the plan was to turn one of the fields into a demonstration farm where the youth and students from the agricultural colleges and universities could come to learn about off-season farming in vegetables.

She said the farm would be fixed with solar-powered boreholes for drip and sprinkle irrigation for farming during the dry season.

The objective, she said, was to ensure sustainable and all-year-round farming and not to always rely on the rains for farming.

Free training

She said the farm would be opened to all those willing to learn about off-season vegetable production free of charge.

“We want to empower the people so that they would be able to find something to do during the dry season and also earn an income,” she said.

Employee

An employee of Awo Fields Limited, Abubakar Suleman, told the media that though not an agric graduate, he got employed by the company and had undergone training that had made him an expert in agriculture.

Aside from the knowledge acquired, Abubakar has a stable stream of income and could now pursue further studies to broaden his horizons.