Picture: Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy hands over the rice mill to the farmer.

For the agriculture sector to develop exponentially and at its most optimal levels for sustained growth and development, the need to adopt relevant technology and mechanization was paramount to achieve this target.

This was the message shared by Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy to the Viwawa rice farmers cluster in Deuba while handing over the groups’ portable rice mill yesterday.

Minister Reddy was speaking on the basis of introducing such technologies to assist in raising the production levels of all commodities, in this context, that of raising local rice production to decrease import bills.

“Over the past two years, we have been rigorously promoting rice because rice is a staple commodity. “We need to push for rice to grow but one of the critical constraining factors in rice production and also in other agriculture is technology adoption. Generally, in the rural areas, farmers tend to shy away from technology, from critical investments in technology,” said Minister Reddy.

He explained that technology contributed immensely to increased productivity and crop yields which in turn contributed to better returns for any farmer.

“Technology brings about better breeds in livestock, and is instrumental in developing better-improved crop varieties like the current rice varieties that we are actively promoting,” he said.

“Currently, we are promoting the 3-month rain-fed rice variety, you don’t need irrigation for this variety. We are no longer promoting the traditional 6-month rice variety, we are promoting this 3-month variety because it is easier and better to grow.

“The turn-around time to see a return on your farm is shorter, unlike the 1-year crops, 2-year crop varieties that sits on the land at longer time intervals and fetching slower and lesser returns for the farmers,” he added.

“So I am urging farmers in the rural areas to start adopting new technologies and machinery, and to review and revise their planting patterns to increase the returns from their farms,” said Hon. Reddy.

“We need to ‘Rice Up’, the entire country needs to ‘Rice Up’, we’ve got more than 83,000 farmers, just imagine if these 83,000 farmers all allocated 1-acre each to grow rice, then we wouldn’t need to import any more rice into the country and we will save the $42m that we are spending to import rice into the country,” he emphasized.

Speaking on behalf of Viwawa rice farmers cluster, Mr Timoci Naleba thanked the Ministry for its continued efforts towards raising the production level of farmers in the long run.

“We thank you for coming here today to share with us the basic information that is needed to venture into rice farming and for also motivating us to plant more rice because we lacked more information and in-depth figures to help us calculate how much we are spending and how much we can earn or profit from rice farming,” said Mr Naleba. 

“We have been planting dalo, a lot of dalo but today, I believe we are motivated to also dedicate some of our lands to rice farming. I don’t usually plant rice but I am now planting rice as I had worked out some of the economics of the impact that planting rice would have on my spending as a farmer, it’s very straightforward and I am happy to be part of this rice programme and to have our cluster benefit from this portable rice mill for our farmers.

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