Yemisi Izuora
Dizengoff Nigeria has entered into partnership with Best Food Global to promote production of quality vegetables and crops that will be harvested all round the year using an emerging technology.
At a Farmers Field Day, organized by Dizengoff and Best Food Global, at Epe in Lagos, chief executive of Best Food Global, Emmanuel Ijewere said with the evolution of Greenhouse technology which is a special technique which offers training to agronomists a lot of farmers with no farming background more farmers will be incorporated to embrace the scheme because of its attraction and return on profit.
Ijewere regretted that though the country has about 4000 Greenhouses but 50 per cent of it is comatose because lack of management on the part of government.
“We are also working with banks and government institutions to find how to finance farmers to use this technology. We must all work together to come up with solutions to make finance available to get this technology.
With Greenhouse technology, you can get your return on investment in 18 months and growing vegetables with Greenhouses is definitely profitable and healthy business.
He disclosed that the partnership would unveil 100 Greenhouse tents before the end of 2018 in Lagos to boost tomato and vegetable production for meet domestic demand
We have just scratched the surface and you already know that about 70 per cent of the tomatoes are imported into the country. There is a huge market for Greenhouse in Nigeria. There is actually a huge market for quality vegetables. Tomato is a highly sensitive product that if you need to transport it from one place to another it will not be presentable to the final consumers. Lagos is africa’s biggest city with about 24.5 million people, so there is so much opportunity for Greenhouse farming”, Ijewere said.
Meanwhile, Dizengoff Nigeria said it has stated that deploying the use of Greenhouse technology to bridge the nation’s demand for tomato and vegetable crops, especially as 70 per cent of the tomato consumed in the country was imported.
The Chief Executive Officer and Country Manager, Dizengoff Nigeria, Anti Ritvonen, explained at the field day that farming was a special technique, profitable and a one-stop shop to achieve food security
Ritvonen, therefore called on banks and government institutions to seek ways to provide access to farmers to invest in Greenhouses, maintaining that there was a huge opportunity for Greenhouse technology investments to meet the ever growing demand of Nigeria’s agriculture needs.
He pointed out that Dizengoff had so far built over 4000 greenhouses in the country, which he said represented about 80 per cent of the total greenhouse projects in the country.
He assured investors that with greenhouse technology, return on Investment was in 18 months while also growing quality and healthy vegetable crops.
He stressed the need for Nigeria to be abreast with global trends, saying that the total number of Greenhouses in Nigeria was a far cry from what was obtainable at the global market.