The Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council, University of Ibadan, Chief Adebisi Akande, has suggested the need for educational institutions and private investors to collaborate with states to establish farming-villages in all Local Councils with a view to attracting young graduates into agriculture.

Akande, who gave the suggestion in his remarks at the 76th Foundation Day Anniversary and 2024 Convocation Ceremonies of the University of Ibadan, said the multiplier effects would result in the innovative fabrication of modern farming implements.

He added that it would also assist in the illustration of practical demonstrations of the essence of academic institutions in using sciences, technologies and management techniques for the promotion of plenteous nutritional agricultural yields and in the attractiveness of business investments in profitable agro-allied industries among the generality of our society.

He said: “We are saying that there are so much disconnects between the Nigerian Universities and the Nigerian agriculture that our farmers are so incapable of feeding our nation.

“Just as the government collaborates with the investors to found computer villages in some cities, may I suggest that our educational institutions together with the investors should collaborate with every state to found farming-villages in every local council with a view to attracting our young graduates into agriculture.

“The regularity of man’s productivity in farming depends on the robustness of his health which, in turn, determines his strength and his energy to carry out his tasks as a farmer. The quality and the level of the working of man’s mind determines the type and the quantum of the yields of his products. The degree of the level of the development of man’s mind also determines the fashion and the sophistication of the tools he would fabricate for his farming. Here comes the impact of the standards and the quality of the types of his education.

“Primarily, for man, the object of production is consumption. Therefore, man is first and foremost the producer and the consumer. It is only when there are surpluses over and above his immediate needs that he keeps something apart for his secondary objective, which is to assist him in building the capital necessary for his future productions.

“In other words, it is after having enough for himself that man’s economic interests begin. It has been a well recognised fact, therefore, that man, as an economic activist, is supposed to be the initiator, the innovator, the accelerator, the investor, the producer, the consumer, the exchanger, the distributor and the creator of his own needs and wants and, also, of the tools he uses to achieve them.”

He lamented that the Nigerian peasant farmers, despite representing 80 per cent of the population, still uses the farming tools consisting of the hoes and cutlasses, which were fashioned in the shapes now variably prevalent in the country’s different cultures since the global spread of iron roughly between the 80th and the fifth centuries before Christ. Any wonder, then, that the Nigerian youths are not enthusiastic in undertaking the drudgery of using such archaic farm implements.

“And any wonder, therefore, that our people are now hungry and starving. Where are the impacts of the Nigerian educational systems, up to the University level, in all these deficits in the types of Nigerian farmers’ affordable tools and in the production innovations in agriculture that now make the farmers’ poverty ridden and the citizenry hungry?”