Before You Eat Your Food, Think of The Source!!!

Before You Eat Your Food, Think of The Source!!!

I grew up in the city of Lagos and travelled often for Christmas with my mum and siblings to visit our grandmother in the village in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. My grandmother used to be a cassava farmer, I followed her with some of the children in the village to harvest cassava and processed them by peeling heaps of cassava, washing, grinding, drying, and frying cassava using firewood. The children in the village usually laugh at me at the way I handle a cutlass to weed and assist my grandmother to fry cassava into gari, a popular food in Nigeria because my eyes would be so red and itchy with tears dropping from my eyes as a result of the smokes from the firewood. Out of pity, my grandmother would ask me to take a rest, that she needed me to be a Doctor so I can take good care of her, that she doesn’t want me to be a farmer because of the tedious nature of the farming activities would affect my health. I made up my mind to be a Doctor since I saw it as an avenue to help the poor in rural communities that couldn’t afford treatment, having seen my grandmother battled with respiratory diseases and back pain as a result of a continuous inhaling of smokes from firewood and the use of cutlass to clear hectares of lands before planting cassava. I then sat for the Jamb examination and put in Medicine but was given Agriculture at the University of Benin, I wrote another Jamb because I want to be a doctor, again I was given Agriculture. I cried my eyes out, my dream of becoming a doctor won’t be a reality I said. I hurried to my Lecturer’s office that Uniben had changed my destiny. At 300 level, Lecturers would come to class and advised us to be proud of Agriculture, that we are their hope for a change in Agriculture, and that they look up to us to bring about the change in Nigeria's Agricultural needs. Somehow along the line, these lecturers made me see my career in Agriculture as a vessel of change but I didn’t know how to go about it, In my final year, I was a privilege to work with a renowned Professor and a Ph.D. student to carry out research work on the effects of graded levels of ripe and unripe plantain peel meals on broiler’s diets which has to do with raising day-old birds till maturity while experimenting with the feed ingredients. Raising 150 birds all by myself for the first was not an easy journey at all. In the day, I gathered plantain peels from women roasting plantains, restaurants, and markets and took them to the hostel to sun-dried them. This was a nuisance for my hostel mates because they didn’t understand what I was doing with heaps of dirty plantain peels. At times, I stayed on the school farm alone up till 11 pm just to make sure the birds were okay and provide charcoal lighting for the birds to keep warm. At the end of the experiment, I became of the best graduating student and my research work was published in the Nigerian Journal of Agriculture, Food, and Environment, in 2015. I went on start my agro-processing business and worked with farmers in the rural communities of Niger Delta and observed that post-harvest loss, climate change, and traditional methods of agricultural production and processing are major challenges affecting farmer’s livelihoods, health and rural development, and food sustainability in Nigeria and Africa at large. Rural farmers need to be educated on climate change and the necessary actions needed to be taken to mitigate its effect on agriculture, they also need to be equipped with modern technology to ensure food sustainability in Nigeria. Out of curiosity to solve these issues faced by farmers, I relocated to Lagos, went on to study Mini-grid design, and other renewable energy courses to understand how renewable energy can help solve farmer’s challenges. I am impassioned about the health and livelihoods of rural farmers in Africa and as a result of the effects of climate change and traditional methods of agricultural activities.

Victoria Edeha-Anthony.