Agriculture in Nigeria is not for the faint-hearted. Despite the challenges of being a young woman in agriculture, Ifeoluwa Oyeyemi continues to plough the soil, as she empowers a younger generation passionate about food security in Nigeria and adding value to the agriculture ecosystem.
Once upon a time, Nigeria had pyramids of groundnuts in the north, bags of cocoa in the south and rubber in the east, and agriculture was an integral part of the economy, providing foreign exchange. Many families had small gardens in their backyards and in schools across Nigeria, education was believed to be incomplete without farming. This all changed, however, when the country’s crude oil was discovered.
As recently as the 2000s, young students like Ifeoluwa Oyeyemi sang the popular Yorùbá folk song —Isé àgbè nisé ilé wa/ Eni kò sisé á ma jalè/ Ìwé kíkó láì sí okó àti àdá kòì pé o, kòì pé o— which loosely translates as “Farming is the work of our land/He who does not work will steal/Learning without farming is incomplete.” Oyeyemi wanted to be a medical doctor—not a farmer. Her father, a retired teacher, paid for his children’s school fees with the proceeds from his cocoa, plantain, and banana farms. Yet as a young person, she never saw agriculture as a viable career because it was not deemed “Professional. We wanted to do ‘bigger things’,” she says laughing. “Farming was something people did on the side. It was also not a cool job. It was a job for old people.”
When Oyeyemi was a teenager, her father apportioned small parcels of land to his children to do some petty farming. Oyeyemi planted vegetables which she sold outside their house to earn money; while holding on to her dream of studying medicine at university. But as fate would have it she secured a place at Ladoke Akintola University in Ogbomosho, Oyo State, to study Animal Nutrition and Biotechnology. Even then, Oyeyemi still did not view agriculture as a career path. After her graduation in 2015, fate once again played a fast one on her. Oyeyemi was posted to a farm in Epe, Lagos State for her National Youth Service Corps, (NYSC) a compulsory one-year programme all university graduates must participate in as part of nation building in Nigeria. That was when she began to view agriculture differently and discovered that agriculture was more than back-breaking work—machines did some of the work. Farmers could earn well—the General Manager then earned over half a million naira monthly, and agriculture can indeed be profitable: every week, they planted about 20,000 vegetables, including peppers, beetroot, cucumber, and the farm never lacked ready buyers. “I started paying more attention. I began to watch how things were done, taking note of the different steps. The first plant I planted was cucumber, I planted about six sachets and got about 100 bags,” says Oyeyemi.
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Agriculture As A Way Out
After her first cucumber harvest on the farm, the farm owner who had always worked with male farm managers was surprised, Oyeyemi said he exclaimed repeatedly: “A woman can do this?” She had worked with seeds previously condemned as useless. She experimented with them after reading online about the many ways to improve seed quality.
While managing the farm, the agropreneur also saw an opportunity in agrochemical distribution. The farm was located around other farms, and they all had the same need, agrochemicals. They had one supplier who would come only twice a month. She struck up a conversation with the company about being a supplier. This was how she first got involved in the agrochemical business.
At the end of her NYSC year, Oyeyemi was equipped with more skills than she had anticipated. About the same time, the farm where she was working experienced challenges; the farm owner struggled to keep afloat financially and some of the workers left. There were also kidnapping cases within close proximity of the farm, which caused fear. For Oyeyemi, it didn’t matter what was happening around her. The experience at the farm had ignited something within and she wanted to build on that. She returned home and told her father that she wanted to become a farmer, but he was not in favour of her decision. “He thought that it was a passing phase, that I would eventually seek employment,” she says. But that never happened. Rather than seeking employment, she became an employer of labour. Oyeyemi started a consulting project, helping people set up farms. Soon, her father realised that she was serious, and he offered her his blessings. With her savings of N250,000, ($608.02) he helped her secure her first plot of land and labourers to work on the farm. This was her first experiment—a farm of cash crops, and with this development, Oyeyemi’s farm became official.
Starting Farmhelp: Providing Help and Raising Young Farmers
In May 2019, Oyeyemi officially founded Farmhelp Agrostores in Ibadan, where she sells seeds, agrochemicals and farm produce. To better understand the quality of the produce she was selling, she set up a demonstration farm in Moniya, also based in Ibadan. The one-acre farmland is leased to her by the Oyo State Agricultural Development Programme (OYSADEP) and is close to the Ajeja Dam—a constant source of water supply. Through the use of flat holes, connectors and drip tapes connected to a mud pump, the plants receive constant water and nutrient supply.
On the land, there are 80 big beds, each 50m long. Different sections of the farm have different crops. On one side, you can see cucumber plants, already harvested and on the other side, you can see flourishing tomato plants. In different corners of the farm, staked on some trees, are empty packets of different agricultural inputs—seeds or fertilisers—used on different patches. This helps Oyeyemi to know what has been used at specific spots. Her demonstration farm gives her the opportunity to experiment and determine what works and what doesn’t. At the time of our visit, she was experimenting with the impact of spacing on improved aeration and fruiting in tomato plants. “We reduced the spacing between the tomatoes. Normally, the space should be wider and have more air so that the tomato can spread well,” she explains. “Experimenting like this helps us to be able to advise the farmers well.”
Oyeyemi also provides insights into costs and profit from running a tomato farm. On one acre of high-yielding tomato farm, all things being equal, you should get about 30 tonnes of tomato fruits, she shares. “When I harvest, I don’t really take it to the open markets. People place orders, we wrap [them] up and send it to them. The shelf life is also quite good. Last year, we sold a crate for about N4,500, ($10.94) because our tomatoes did not ripen at the peak of the sales,” she explains. “In the end, we made over 1million naira in profit. If [a] vegetable is well-managed, if you maintain good agricultural practice, you can get thrice your investments.”
Since Oyeyemi started her business, she has not received any form of funding. So, she redistributes the revenue made from sales of agrochemicals and farm produce back into the business. “If you depend on grants in Nigeria, you cannot do agriculture. You cannot wait on these probabilities to do your work,” she adds. Beyond the challenge of funding, another roadblock is getting workers on her farm. Since the advent of crude oil in Nigeria, many have abandoned commercial farming. In Oyo state where Oyeyemi’s farm is located, she says that many would rather be bike riders than think of farming—painting a clear picture of the misconceptions that still exist around agricultural work.
“We need to organise exchange programmes to learn how to produce these seeds ourselves. Seed technology is something we really need now.”
Being Young and Female In The Agriculture Sector
While research shows that by 2080, Africa will be home to the largest youth population in the world, today, three in five of the unemployed people on the continent are young adults. Agriculture has job creation possibilities to reduce youth unemployment and reduce food insecurity. Despite an extensive value chain, each with its own potential to contribute to the economy, many young people do not consider agriculture as a career option. Oyeyemi says that this may be a result of the stereotypes around farming. The traditional image of a farmer in Africa is male, old with shrivelled hands. She faces and defies these stereotypes daily during the course of her work.
Once, in a market, after she introduced herself as a farmer, the person asking her looked her up and down, then asked her to bring her hands. The person looked at her palms, felt them and said: “Your hands are too soft. You cannot be a farmer.” The message was clear: if you were truly a farmer, your hands would be hard from hoeing and back-breaking work.
On another occasion, she was trying to employ a worker on her farm and the man responded: “Please show me your boss. I cannot work with a woman. I have your type at home,” insinuating that women do not have the wherewithal to nurture plants, or manage farms because they raise children. She shares that whenever she lists her occupation as farmer on forms, she gets suspicious looks. “If I write ‘agro dealer,’ they will understand, but a woman cannot be a farmer. The truth is that many do not believe that I’m a farmer until they see the results of my work.”
Today, even though she’s far from the medical career she dreamt of as a child, Oyeyemi describes herself as a medical farmer. “I’m a medical farmer,” she says humorously. “Through the drips, I inject the plants with the right dosage of fertilisers and other input that they need per time. Also, without food, no doctor will administer drugs to you. It’s still medicine. Indirectly, I practise medicine.”
Changing the Narrative and Facing The Challenges
Gradually, the narrative of poverty around farming is changing, with more young people getting involved in the practice. To help change the narrative, Oyeyemi trains young Nigerians by visiting schools, sharing her experiences and maintaining an active WhatsApp group where she shares agricultural best practices. Beyond just the training, she also provides them with quality agricultural inputs—seeds as well as grow bags—for their own experimentation. “Many of them are thinking that after secondary school, they will learn how to ride a bike. The same way they have that orientation, is the same way we should also teach them about agriculture,” says Oyeyemi. She shares a testimony of a secondary schooler who passed through her training in 2020. He planted sweet corn and made a bountiful harvest which he sold. So far, she has trained over eight hundred students, some from higher institutions.
Aside from dealing with stereotypes and funding challenges, last year when the pandemic hit, agriculture was badly affected. There were curfews initiated across Nigeria, impacting the distribution of harvested agricultural produce. Since many people could not go out, even the supermarket chains that farmers supplied products to had to reduce their intake. “There was very low purchase,” Oyeyemi recalls. “It affected the vegetable farmers because at the time that we planted, we did not see the future ahead of us. In the end, we had to sell the products at giveaway prices.”
Even when lockdowns and curfews ended, there was seed scarcity. Since most of the high-yielding seeds are imported, it took a while before they made their way into Nigeria. According to Oyeyemi, the production of high-yielding seeds is something that agricultural research organisations in Nigeria need to work on. “We cannot always rely on foreign organisations,” she says. “We need to organise exchange programmes to learn how to produce these seeds ourselves. Seed technology is something we really need now.”
Despite these challenges, Oyeyemi emphasises there are several opportunities in the agricultural value chain waiting to be explored, even beyond farming itself. She insists there is so much more to the business: “You can work with farms in an area to connect them with markets. You can provide infrastructure to farmers. You can be involved in research. You don’t have to be in it, actually farming. The value chain is huge, just find a part of it and deliver value.”
Value delivery is central to Farmhelp’s work. As such, whenever you see Oyeyemi, she is likely at her agrochemical store, selling products to nurture farms or at her own farm, nurturing her vegetables. When she’s not there, she’s likely in a classroom teaching young Nigerians about the farming industry. Through it all, she’s never abandoned her medical knowledge. Instead, she remains committed to agriculture, the way a doctor does to the sick.