IAR/ABU boosts cowpea farming with ‘innovation platforms’

The Institute for Agricultural Research (IAR) of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria on Tuesday said it had introduced innovative measures that would boost and sustain cowpea production in Nigeria.

The project was tagged ‘Taking Cowpea to Scale in West Africa - Nigeria’, is meant to engage West African countries of Mali, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria in the modern methods of cowpea production under the sponsorship of USAID.

Professor Ibrahim Umar Abubakar, the Director of IAR, said farmers selected for the programme were given threshers and grinders.

He said the Innovation Platforms (IPs) were introduced to ensure the continuity of the cowpea production project even after the departure of the sponsors - USAID.

He added; “Continuity is the watchword; continuity is what we want, we want farmers to keep on participating in the project. We don't want the project to die. Innovative Platform is a platform that we have collated all the stakeholders into a particular unit, so that even if the project is off, the activities can still continue with the stakeholders.

“The platform is divided into three platforms so that the information can go round. The farmers in each state of Kano, Sokoto and Katsina can benefit enormously from it.

“When you grow cowpea, processing is very important. It is not just enough to grow cowpea and say you have a very high yield. The question is what do you do with the yield? You have to reduce the feed losses and it can only be reduced when appropriate processes are being done; one of such is threshing.”

In his speech, the coordinator of the project, Dr. Nafi'u Abdu, said the aim of the project was to promote wide scale adoption of improved cowpea varieties that were of high quality.