Agricultural researchers urged to up-date farmers

The Kwahu-South District Chief Executive, Mr Joseph Omari, has called on agricultural researchers and extension officers to up-date farmers on new and emerging technologies and create avenues for interaction between them and other policy makers to solve problem affecting food production.

He said since agriculture was the source of livelihood for over 60 per cent of the country’s population, it should be handled as a business.

Mr Omari was addressing a district Research Extension Farmer Livelihood Committee (RELC) meeting for a 60-member farmers’ group and agriculture extension officers at Mpraeso in the Kwahu-South District.

He urged the RELC to identify the farmers’ problems, find solution to them and facilitate communication between the researchers, farmers and extension officers to increase food production.

Mr Omari advised farmers to take the advice of the extension officials seriously and implement them to increase their yield to enhance their socio-economic development.

He said the assembly and the district agricultural development unit would cooperate to solve some of the constraints militating against the development of agriculture in the district to increase food production.

Dr George Okyere-Boateng, a plant bio-technologist of the Oil Palm Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, said the objective of the meeting was to enable farmers to present problems and diseases affecting their crops to the researchers to find solutions to them.

He said the forum was to serve as a technology transfer from the researchers through the extension officers to the farmers for implementation to increase livestock and food production in all the 21 districts in the Eastern Region.

The Eastern Regional Agricultural Extension Officer, Mr Samuel Allotey, said diseases like onion bulb rot, pepper leaf curl, meal barks in cassava and taro leaf blight have been identified among some crops in the district and were presenting them to the researchers to find solutions to them.

Source: GNA