The All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Plateau state chapter has blamed excessive rainfall, late blight and lack of adherence to good agricultural practices for limited production of Irish potatoes.
John Chindap Wuyep, state chairman of AFAN, said millions of naira were lost in last year’s potato farming but that a lot of lessons had been learned from the challenges encountered.
He said, “The issue of the price of potato is as a result of climate change, excessive rainfall this year and potato blight, which was very severe. Almost 90 per cent of what was produced during the rainy season was affected by the late blight.
“Most of the farmers are now in the field so that they can try the dry season because the climate change this year made the rain very excessive that all what the farmers produced became waste. But I believe in the next few months, you will see potato coming from dry season farming.”
Related Posts
Wuyep said a lot needed to be done to boost the production of the crop, especially now that farmers were knowledgeable about the difficulties they went through.
He said, “Sometimes, we the farmers, we don’t follow the best agricultural practices, particularly in the application of pesticides to enable you to prevent unforeseen circumstances of diseases.
“Those who followed them suffered minimal losses. We believe that so many people have learned a lesson. Many even lost their lives because of the trauma. This climate change, we have to adapt to it by adopting modern and best agricultural practices.
“With the climate change here on the Plateau, we want the government to provide farmers with small dams for them to farm all year round. You can’t farm for only three months and you go and rest. If all these are there, the infrastructure: dams, roads and concussive markets and conditioning like the storage facilities, I believe everything would be okay. The excessive rain made the blight worse.”
