We bring to you the concluding part of the tour of members of the Nigeria Union of Journalist to Songhai Farm during their Press Week. The tour guide was the Production Manager of Songhai Farm, Godfrey Godfrey.
Hear him:
The water moves to the next level and is collected as liquid manure. This is the chain of what we are producing here. From waste, we now get wealth to feed our fish, to cook in our kitchen. You can now imagine how much you will be wasting assuming you are buying gas cylinder to feed students of up to 30-40 people. So what we do now is to collect these materials, and get our materials free of charge. It produces blue flame and you know that blue flame is one of the hottest. This is what we are using to cook for our students. The more you charge, the more it produces and the more you have the effluents. The effluents now serve as manure, so nothing to waste.
It can also be used as a form of electricity. A community can have a project like that. From the public toilet you can collect this methane gas and you can use it as a form of electricity.
At the Poultry Section
This is broiler production, a form of poultry keeping. You keep poultry based on your objective is it for egg? Is it for meat? Is it for the dual purpose? So here, this is for meat production, and this is broiler. What we do is all in, all out, system. You can make your money here and when we are teaching our students we want them to make their productions based on demand so that they can do what is called all in all out. We don’t rear them more then eight weeks. They defecate a lot. If they are in a house, there will be an outbreak of disease easily. After four weeks, we bring them here so they will no longer be in contact of their droppings. They will eat and drink and we collect their droppings. So the droppings will either serve as manure or as input for our bio-gas. So we need it. So with that, they are not in contact with their droppings and the mortality rate is now plus or minus zero because those things that normally cause disease outbreak are no longer in contact with them.
We get our local workforce from the vicinity here. We give them training and pay them. With these, some of them are now trying to get up something for themselves, transforming a passive consumer to an active producer.
The laying capacity of the birds is about 65-70% of lay. We collect up to 140 crates of eggs a day. The house is capable of housing 500 birds. They lay in a public cage system, that is, they are in a building and also in cages. All the waste materials are collected to fertilize our green house and also we use it to produce maggots. Maggots are part of the materials we use to compound the feed for the fish because maggots contain about 50% of protein and fishes require high protein. If you must buy fish meal to meet up the protein requirement of your fish, the cost of production will be very high. That is why we use maggots to complement their feeding. We collect maggots up to 40 kilos per day. The waste materials are also used to produce compost, from where we can now collect to fertilize our gardens. We don’t use fertilizer. We compound any waste material as fertilizer.
The Moringa Plant
Moringer plant is a plant that contains all the essential amino acids both for human beings and also for animals and even for plants. From the roots to the leaves are very important. The vitamins and minerals they contain are good for human beings, for pregnant mothers, for babies. It also acts as root enhancers. For the roots of young plants to develop very well, you crush it and collect the water, in the ratio of 1:32 and spray it on the plants. The roots will develop very well. It also helps to build immunity in human beings. That is why most of our animals, we give it to them in other to build up their immunity so that they will not be exposed to diseases. You can take it as tea, you can take it as vegetables. You can dry it and make it as powder. The roots also act as pesticides. You can hardly see pests or disease attacking moringa plant. It is an important plant that people should know about, plant, and eat.
Mulching
When we cut the grass and after feeding our grass-cutters, they also urinate on the grass, making them to be rich in urea. We use it for mulching. The mulching protects the soil from losing humidity. As the mulch dries and decomposes, it also adds manure to the plant.
There is also the wood mulching. In time past you can leave your forest for 7 to 8 or 14 years and when you come back to it, the land will be very fertile. This is because you have long years of plants falling down and decomposing and then drying up. There will be what we call, bacteria action on these woods and when bacteria act on the wood, it increases the micro and macro organisms in the soil that help in breaking down of organic materials to make the soil to be very rich. Now instead of allowing our land to stay for five to six year, we do what is called continuous cropping and also bringing this phenomenon that makes soil to be very fertile by mulching with wood.
We have what we call a wood chopper machine that cuts every form of wood into pieces. The more the soil becomes more fertile. On a particular bed you cultivate up to seven times. The only thing you do is to change crops. This is what you can do in urban cultivation where you have little or no land, even in your backyard. Mulching means surface coverage to prevent evaporation of humidity. It maintains humidity of the soil and acts as fertilization of the soil.
Rice Production
We produce two varieties of rice and our aim is to produce 50 hectares of land for rice. What we do here is seed multiplication and training. We have a very good rice plant. The essence is to train farmers and produce quality seeds, so that they can go into quality production and we buy back from them and process from parboiling up to bagging. We produce two varieties, Farrow 44 and Nerica series. We have Nerica 4, and Nerica 8. Nerica is a type of rice that can grow upland, while Farrow 44 is called swamp rice. Nerica can grow like maize requiring little water, but Farrow 44 requires swamp area. So you plant three kilos of rice and harvest 600 kilos of rice.
We have the rice mill and we do everything about rice up to bagging. We can manage every quantity that a farmer will produce. We have a very big warehouse. When government is saying that we are no longer going to import rice, we are prepared.
Piggery
Pigs are good converters. You can bring any waste material to feed the pigs and turn them into pork and they are very prolific. We have a minimum of eight piglets per farrow and up to 19 piglets per farrow. We started with one and now we are going to three. They can have about three births in a year. A good mother has six pairs of tits (breasts).
Snails
Plantain acts as macro environment for the snails. They have to preserve the humidity and cocoyam can grow under. The environment becomes cool and we introduce snails. The leaves act as a cover for the snails. So as you are harvesting your snail, you are harvesting your cocoyam and you are harvesting you plantain. The leaves act as tek to prevent wind attack.
Speaking to newsmen after the tour, the founder of Songhai Farms, Rev. Godfrey Nzamujo said, “This is a result of people working together, leadership appropriating what they think will change the system and recommitting ourselves to it. Sustainability is the key word. Human capital is the key thing here and in Songhai we understand that principle, that we have to build a core group that are polyvalent, multi-skilled and who are capable of not only appropriating the principle of Songhai, but taking it up to another level.
“I want this centre to be appropriated by more people to encourage us because it is going to snowball to another level.
“We need your support to tell the story, to tell people that it is possible. We can really change. Africa can be a place we can be proud of. Africa can only wake up when we, myself, all of us, appropriate that core principle of honesty.
Earlier, the Media and Communications Director, Kingsley Uranta, said they are working in partnership with Songhai international and for five years, the faculties will be managed and run by Songhai International before it is taken over.
“RSSDA does not work alone. It works with partners. Some of the partners are UNDP UNITA, RUST, all the line Ministries, Shell etc. They bring in the private sector mentality to ensure the survival of the faculties, make money and sustain itself. We provide an enabling environment for the project to survive. The project will survive because it is not hinged on government”, he said. ####
Kenneth Amabipi
