The European Union-funded ReDIAL project has introduced functional multi-crop thresher services to help reduce post-harvest losses.
The ReDIAL project was funded by the EU in response to the appeal made by farmer groups including women farmers who urgently needed functional Multi-Crop Thresher services to reduce the post-harvest losses.
This project will specifically support women farmers in Donkorkrom of Kwahu Afram Plains in the Eastern Region who face persistent challenges including post-harvest losses. Mr. Kyei Yamoah, the Project Manager explained that the ReDIAL project had improved the productivity of marginalized farmers and was strengthening rural agriculture and food security.
Ms Vida Asieduwaa, an officer of the project explained that the ReDIAL project was making efforts to support marginalised farmers to get optimum returns on a sustainable basis.
Speaking to GNA, Madam Emma Gyamfi, an aged woman farmer from the village of Sewua of Kwahu Afram Plains North District, explained that as an active farmer, she lived with only her aged husband, and they had survived farming for over 45 years.
According to her, with the help of her husband, she cultivates three acres of maize every year and earns about GHS1,000 every farming season, but, in the 2020 farming season, she lost her investment because of bushfires at the peak of the threshing season.
The situation she attributed to the fact that there were only four threshers in the district serving the large-scale commercial farmers in the district compelled her to stop farming.
However, during the ReDIAL project’s profiling of marginalized farmers in the district, she decided to go into farming again with the hope of receiving support from the project.
Through the ReDIAL project, she has been able to sustain her farming livelihood that it took her about 20 days to manually thresh eight bags of maize, but with the multi-crop thresher introduced by the project, she was able to thresh 14 bags of maize (100Kg) in less than two hours.
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Madam Gyamfi explained that she had been able to sell her maize at GHS 400 per bag and earned GHS 5,000 net profit. She said, “now I can expand my farm because I do not have to worry about threshing. My success story has encouraged other women from the locality to also take up farming”, she added.
Mr. Kyei Yamoah explained that the ReDIAL project was a four-year project funded by the European Union, being implemented in Ghana by a consortium consisting of Friends of the Nation (FoN) (the Lead), Tropenbos Ghana, the Faculty of Renewable Natural Resources of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (FRNR KNUST) and supported by SAYeTECH Company and SESI Technology.
According to him, the overall objective of the project was to contribute to transformation and innovation in agriculture and food systems in Ghana through action research, application of innovative technologies and organization of farmers and multi-stakeholder platforms.