• Madam Mary Perpetua Kwakuyi (blue) with some Heads of Department at EKMA

 A Non-Governmental Organisation, Goshen Global Vision (GGV) in the Western Region is working hard for farmers to stop the use of dangerous chemicals on crops and to adopt the use of organic manure which is safer for humans.

The use of poultry manure, rabbit faeces, other animal faeces and Biochar to fertilise crops and use the urine of rabbits as pesticides is safer for human consumption than the chemicals applied for fast growth of crops.

The Executive Director of GGV, Madam Mary Perpetua Kwakuyi dis­closed this to Heads of Department and some farmers within the Ef­fia-Kwesimintsim Municipal Assembly (EKMA) of the Western Region at the end of Projects Stakeholder Engage­ment for 2022.

She said her outfit was working to support food security by distributing economic and fruit trees to commu­nities within the municipality adding “so far 320 fruit trees have been dis­tributed and for the next four years GGV will concentrate on this to help stabilise food security in the commu­nities”.

She said the country would talk of planting five million seedlings but due to lack of protection not even 100 seedlings would survive but GGV would make sure all seedlings planted were protected and nurtured so that stray animals would not destroy these economic trees.

She said this was another means by which alternative livelihood was provided for the communities because the land which had been used for de­cades had been exhausted and could no longer feed the crops efficiently to produce any better crops.

Madam Kwakuyi said GGV was working hard to encourage farmers to adopt new technologies by farming small lands and through the appli­cation of organic manure like rabbit faeces, poultry manure, cow dung and Biochar they could harvest more than the use of fertiliser which was more expensive and even dangerous for human consumption because of the chemicals involved.

She appealed to Ghanaians to start farming in their back yards because they did not need a large parcel of land to farm.

She said the use of worn out vehicles tyres, jerrican containers popularly called Kuffour gallon and other containers could be filled with soil with rich manure and plants like guava, pawpaw, maize and other crops planted in these containers to produce food for the family.

She said rabbits multiplied very fast and with a cage to house eight rabbits, one could produce for the family and have enough to sell to the general public to get money to sup­port the family income.

The Executive Director said GGV was aiming to introduce “one school, one garden, one rabbit cage” to use the droppings from the rabbits to fertilise the garden and the remnants from the garden would be used to feed the rabbit so in the end nothing would be wasted thereby making it a value chain.

The Planning Officer of EKMA, Mr Samuel Amihere thanked all the participants for coming and said the collaboration between GGV and EKMA would surely sensitise the farmers to adopt the new technologies in or­der to produce fresh crops devoid of chemicals.

From Peter Gbambila, Effiakuma.