Emmanuel Ugwu-Nwogo in Enugu
Enugu State Government has reiterated its commitment to acquire 1,000 tractors as it ploughs ahead to attain full mechanisation of farming activities in line with Governor Peter Mbah’s agenda of transforming agriculture into a money-spinning sector.
To achieve this set objective, the state has already established an agricultural mechanisation hub, the Nortra Tractor Assembly Plant and Service Centre in partnership with investors from Denmark.
The state Commissioner for Agriculture, Dr. Patrick Nwabueze Ubru, said that the assembly plant has been functionalised to ensure that the state meets its target of putting 1,000 tractors to work in the farms.
He told members of the Correspondents Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Enugu State Council (NUJ), during a facility tour of the tractor assembly plant, that the facility “is a game changer for agriculture in the state”.
The commissioner recalled that prior to the inception of the Governor Mbah administration, Enugu State could only boast of a handful of tractors but now the state government has acquired no fewer than 150 tractors.
He assured that the state would in due course achieve its target of owning 1,000 tractors as promised by the governor, even though the assembly plant has not commenced local assembling of tractors.
Ubru underlined his assurances by showing the visiting journalists a warehouse stocked with completely knocked down(CKD) tractor parts ready to be assembled.
“We can assemble 10 tractors a day and there’s room for expansion,” he said.
Ubru said that more than 3,000 jobs would be created through the agricultural mechanisation project as youths would be engaged for assembling tractors, driving, servicing and maintenance of the equipment.
Apart from assembling of the tractors, the plant would also provide the farm implements such as disc ploughs, harrows, planters, harvesters, among others, that would be fitted to the tractors to make farming easy.
The commissioner said that while the state remains focused to hit the 1,000 target, it has already deployed 67 tractors to farms across the state.
According to him, the tractors were given out on lease to farmers at N70,000 per day which he said was over 50 per cent lower than the N150,000 that farmers used to pay to use the tractor before the present administration.
“Our farmers are now happy because the governor has fulfilled his promise of agricultural mechanisation,” he said, adding, “what we’re doing is to make our farming better, and make our farmers happy.”
The Managing Director of Nortra Tractor Assembly, Morten Andersen, said that the firm was fully prepared and has the installed capacity to achieve its mandate.
The assembly plant is seen as the fulcrum of the commercialisation of agriculture in Enugu State given that agribusiness forms a major component of the state’s economic growth which Mbah is aiming to hit N30 billion target.
It is intended to power the state’s commercial agricultural initiatives and farm estates and facilitate tractor leasing programs for local farmers to scale up food production.
The facility includes a fully equipped service and repair centre, plus a training institute for local technicians, thereby opening up an avenue for youths to acquire skills in modern farming operations.