Picture: Minister for Agriculture Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy with the Ministry staff and farmers.

Recipients of the Ministry of Agriculture’s various livestock development programmes are being challenged to become model livestock farmers to help steer the growth of the livestock sector locally.

With the continued importation of 99 per cent of sheep meat into the country at a cost of $48million annually, small ruminant farmers are being urged to do their part and to utilize all available Government assistance and programmes to help reduce this import bill by improving herd numbers and expanding their paddocks.

Speaking to successful recipients who received their goat and sheep fencing kits yesterday at Lawaqa, Sigatoka, Minister for Agriculture Hon. Dr. Mahendra Reddy issued them a challenge to become model farmers within their respective farming communities to help drive development for the sector.

“Have a plan, plan to extend, extend your paddocks and grow your herd, and we look forward to collaborating further with you so you can become a model farmer, all of you here today have been chosen through merit but I urge you to continue to expand as farmers so we can, together, grow the sector.

“Please treat this as an investment from Government on your farms, be proud to be a farmer, especially seeing as you are the chosen lot out of all the farmers out there who are knocking on our doors to receive some form of assistance or another,” said Minister Reddy.

“The reason is we’ve got 83,000 farmers that we need to look after in the country and all of them needs to receive assistance from the Ministry, once, after that, once they’ve become successful, we can re-visit them and provide some more assistance,” he added.

He also elaborated that from 2021 to date, the Ministry had distributed the largest number of fencing kits to farmers than it had ever done before, highlighting that the past practice of assisting the same large scale farmer, year in year out was no longer being implemented at the Ministry, stating that a new growth model was being applied to identify farmers that could make the successful transition from subsistence or smallholder towards commercial farming levels.

“Thousands of subsistence and smallholder farmers were not able to grow because they were not able to buy fencing materials, they were left out and because of that they were not able to transit from subsistence/smallholder farmers into medium onwards to larger-scale farming and it is for this reason that the livestock sector was not growing at a rate at which we wanted,” said Minister Reddy.

“At the moment, we are importing 99% of sheep meat, $48million in value and we think that by raising sheep or goat, we will be able to reduce this substantially so one way is if we assist and give leverage to these farmers who are rearing 20, 30, 40 close to 100 sheep or more and provide them with fencing materials, they can grow the number of their stock and increase their herd size.

“And that’s the only way we can promote livestock development so I want to see all these twelve recipients as commercial livestock farmers,” said Hon. Reddy.

Meanwhile, Ms Babita Devi of Lomawai has praised the efforts of the Ministry towards growing the sector; “On behalf of the sheep and goat farmers of Sigatoka, we heartily thank the Minister and his Ministry for handing out these fencing kits to us to help us develop our paddocks,” said Ms Devi.

“Your Ministry is doing a marvellous and commendable job assisting all farmers in the country in every way possible and I will take it upon myself to promote livestock and goat, and sheep farming to encourage all farmers to increase their farming output for the betterment of our agriculture sector,” she said.

The fencing kit handed out to farmers was made possible through the Ridge-To-Reef programme, the Sheep Extension Programme and the Goat Extension Programme under the Ministry of Agriculture.

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