Follow Us on Google
By Chinyere Anyanwu
The Origin Tech Group has assured that the food challenges confronting the country would be solved to a large extent when its newly launched farm project is fully implemented.
The group’s Executive Chairman, Samuel Johnson, gave the assurance yesterday during the official unveiling of its agricultural initiative, Corporate Farm, in Lagos.
Prince Samuel said, “we are introducing medium scale and large scale farming to Nigeria. We are focusing on awakening moribund farms and also on establishing new ones. Helping these farms to grow. And also for people to start making good money from agriculture.”
He added that, “Corporate Farm will also support smallholders that are clustered into cooperatives so that they can get supports that are available within the Origin Tech sphere of influence.
The Origin Tech Group executive chairman noted the bureaucratic bottlenecks faced by farmers but assured that with Corporate Farm, farmers can access help when needed.
Other News
He said, “what we had before now is that people are left alone. You have your farm. You have challenges. Nobody is there to assist you. Nobody is there to help you. But currently, with Corporate Farm, we can link you up with help. We can link you up with support. We can link you up and quickly solve your problem.
“Ccorporate Farm is coming to fill a gap that has been there for a long time. Corporate Farm has come to fill that gap of lack of convergence and lack of support for both existing farms and new farmers who want to come into the country but don’t know how. You have funding. You want to do agriculture. You don’t know how to go about it. With Corporate Farm, all those challenges are a thing of the past.”
Also speaking, the Lagos State Commissioner for Agriculture, Abimbola Olusanya, commended Origin Tech Group for taking the country’s agriculture to the next level with the berthing of Corporate Farm and proving that agriculture is the next frontier in Nigeria.
According to Olusanya, “the timing is perfect for all of us to come together to change the narrative around food systems in Lagos and particularly in Nigeria. With the launch of the Corporate Farm model, I think the time is now.
‘And so with our full support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Systems, we put our weight behind this because this is the direction we all have to go if we want to scale quickly and achieve food security in this country.”
Olusanya appealed to financial institutions to have confidence in the Corporate Farm initiative because it is a model that has a level of certainty embedded in it, saying “as soon as we’re able to do this and get this off the ground, we’ll start to see a massive turnaround in the food system space.”
