Try Integrated Farming For Sustainable Income

The rainy season is here again and so is the planting season. Are you set to invest in agriculture this year? There are vast investment opportunities with high wealth creation potentials you can venture exploit.
You can invest in crop farming such as cassava, maize, rice, yams and beans to tap into the benefits inherent in them. You can as well make fortunes from livestock production including poultry, snails, rabbits, grass cutters, pigs, sheep and cattle and many others.
However, when you structure your farm in such a way as to combine the livestock with crop production in the farm, what you get is an integrated farm that would give you some leverage.
Integrated farming is all about taking advantage of the complementary roles of crops cultivation and livestock production. It is a management system that ensures that there is no wastage in the system. Your farm could be a combination of crop-livestock production, fish-crop production or even crop-fish-livestock integration.
The essence is to ensure maximum production in crops and livestock by optimally utilising the resources of one component in the production of the other.
This implies that wastes from one component are recycled for productive purposes in another aspect of the farm system. This may even give rise to the springing up of agro-allied industries.
The whole essence is to create value-added goods for the prosperity of the farmer.
The wastes of one component of the farm would be used as an important resource for the other. An integrated farm could be a mixture of crops (cassava or maize farm), poultry, fishery, piggery and feed mill. For instance, dungs of animals and poultry droppings provide essential manure to produce crops of greater yields or as fish feeds while crop residues and by-products would be recycled to feed the animals whose wastes would be ploughed back into the farm as manures to produce greater crop yields.
Advantages
An integrated farm provides an opportunity to increase yields per unit area by virtue of intensification of crop and allied enterprises. By using waste materials of one component at the least cost, you are reducing the cost of production and eliminating interference of middleman in most input used.
Using by-products of linked component provides opportunity for sustaining the production base for a long time. Again, it produces from different sources of nutrition for balanced diet for the livestock.
Since wastes are turned into useful resource, it ensures safety of the environment, which would have been polluted. Waste materials are recycled by linking appropriate components thus minimising environment pollution. For instance, cassava peels that would have littered the whole place, causing environmental hazard could be used to feed the animals such as pigs, goats or birds. Or the dung from the poultry would be used to feed the fish.
Planting of legumes in the farm mitigates scarcity of fodders for the animal component.
Integrated farming guarantees continuous stream of income for the farmer throughout the year because of the interaction of several enterprises in the farm.
The imperative of adding value gives the farmer opportunity to use new technology in his farm and ensure economic use of inputs.
Combination of crop and livestock enterprises creates jobs all year round and whenever any of the produce in the integrated farm is grown to a commercial level, there would be surplus value addition that can translate to development of agro-allied industries.
Value Addition
I have always said that for a farmer to derive optimal benefits from his efforts, he should add value to his primary products. For instance, if you are a cassava farmer and you do not process your cassava, you can only sell them at a giveaway prices and if it is during the period of glut, you could lose out completely. That is bad business.
However, if you refrain from selling the cassava tubers and decide to process it into garri, fufu, glucose, and ethanol and so on, you stand a chance to reap bounteously from your investment.
Likewise, if you are a fish farmer or poultry farmer, you should have the mindset of processing your fish into smoked fish for local consumption or for export and your chickens into frozen meat. If you are cattle or sheep farmer, you should be thinking of not just selling the animals at maturity but also to process the skins into hides and wools. In this way, you would get a commensurate reward for your labour.
Last Line
What I am saying in effect is that the farmer should take advantage of the cheap and often wasted agro-products due to spoilage in the farms to add value to other produce. In this way, you would not only reap huge profits but also be in business when others are folding.
To your success! Keep a date next week.