Through a tripartite memorandum of understanding between PIND, the International Institute for tropical agriculture (IITA), and the National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) signed in the quarter, PIND collaborated with the Building an Economically Sustainable, Integrated Cassava Seed System II (BASICS II) project to train, certify and onboard 80 new cassava seed entrepreneurs (VSEs) in Delta, Abia, Imo, Akwa Ibom, and Cross Rivers States to scale up PIND’s intervention on access to improved cassava seeds in the region, with over 2200 bundles of improved stems sold by VSEs in 2020.
Leveraging their proximity to farmers following restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, agro-dealers and farm service providers trained by PIND provided various services to the farmers during the quarter. Their activities, including training and demonstrations, and the sale of agro-inputs including fertilizers and improved stem varieties reached 4,465 farmers (2,713 females) across various locations in the region, enabling them to fully utilize the late planting season to minimize the effect of the pandemic’s disruption to their planting activities in earlier quarters.
In Q3, PIND applied its recently developed multipliers framework to estimate the impact of the cassava sector intervention activities on the farmers. The findings showed that:
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- 8,868 cassava farmers adopted the improved practices taught by the agro-dealers and farm service providers and expanded their production
- The adopting farmers created 890 new jobs (exceeding the annual target of 600 jobs) for the provision of land clearing, tillage, planting of stem, application of fertilizers, weeding and other field services triggered by their increased production.
- The 8,868 farmers who adopted new innovation on their farms recorded higher gross margin compared with the non-benefitting farmers at an adoption rate of 94%, earning a projected income of 1,248,714,625 Naira from an average size of 0.85 hectare of farms
The Quarter also saw the harvest of 11 demo plots established across Abia, Cross River, Imo, and Ondo States by PIND-partner input companies, Harvestfield Industries and Bayer Crop Science in 2019 under the demo plot program. Extrapolating 0.07ha per plot into 1ha to align with the demo plot established practice, the plots attained significantly higher than the average yields of around 10-12 tons/ha from farmer plots, attaining an average yield of 34 tons per hectare across Cross River, Ondo, Imo and Abia States. 2019 impact assessments showed that the farmers who adopted the practices demonstrated in the demo plots in 2018 earned an average yield of 18 ton/ha from a baseline of 10-12 tons/ha. The lower yield by adopting farmers compared to that of demo plots is attributed to factors such as errors during the implementation of new practices, irregularity in the supply of and inability of farmers to afford all the recommended crop protective products and in some cases, herdsmen attacks and flooding on farmlands.
