An Agriculturist and the Founder of COFARMS GREENAID REVOLUTION, Joseph Ali has said that its organization has built over 33 organic communities across 6 states with the support of partners.
He spoke during an interview with newsmen in Abuja .
He said ,” as an organization we have recorded a lot of successes over the past five years with a lot of challenges too but the journey has been God all through. We have built over 33 organic communities across 6 states and with the support of our partners European Union, GIZ, NICOP and others we have trained and certified 13,000 organic certified farmers across 6 states, built over 180,000 farmers into organic agricultural communities who today produce uniform commodities for other company’s raw materials for both local and the international market.”
According to him, we create the concept of the community agriculture to eradicate isolation practice in agriculture space, reduce the number of small scale farmers by pulling their small resources to commercialized agricultural production, produce uniform commodities and access all input within their crop community with the focus of financial inclusion and modern day Agriculture using technology as a tool for gender inclusion.
He continued, ” We also pioneer the Nigeria Go Organic Project. The Nigerian Go Organic project is a project by COFARMS GREENAID LTD focuses on increasing Organic Agriculture participation in Nigeria through training on Organic Agriculture, organic input production and distribution, organic market inclusion and market linkage and financial inclusion for rural farmers in Nigeria. The Project drives good agricultural practices within rural farmers, celebrate the rural farmers, help farmers possess the knowledge required to convert farming to Agribusiness, start the conversion of farms and farmers to organic agriculture, provide new and improved knowledge on farming and deploy modern agro technologies/solutions to the farm to boost productivity, profitability and proficient of all agro actors within the Agricultural Value Chain and create linkages that connect all major actors to both raw materials and market.”
“In 2021 the project expanded to Africa Go Organic with presence in Cameroon, Togo and over 16 states in Nigeria with reach to over 300,000 farmers in total,” he said.
Commenting about his organisation , he said ,”CO-FARMS GREENAID REVOLUTION LTD is an Organic Farmers community who are producing, processing and distributing Organic end products and inputs. COFARMS is founded in 2016 as an ICT Agricultural Company, e-commerce market for agricultural commodities who operates both online (www.cofarms.org, www.cofarms.ng )/on-ground farming systems that provide a profitable platform for agricultural investment. Our model helps to reduce the number of small scale farmers in our society by training and building them into communities of farmers who pull their small resources together to commercialize Agricultural production.”
Asked where the level he want his organisation to attain in the next 5 years ,he said,”In the next 5 years by 2026 we will like to train and certify 200,000 farmers across Nigeria and Africa build a database of organic producing farmer to 1 million across Nigeria and 10 other African countries and be able to process all raw materials to finish product. The big picture is to meet the target of 1000 homes in Nigeria and other part of Africa eating our products daily, convert 25% Nigeria arable farmland to organic farmland, produce up to 42 million metric tons of organic certified food yearly and achieve market inclusion for organic foods in the local market. Gender inclusion and participation is something we are passionate about and we want to achieve 60% population of women farmers.”
