The Cross River State Government have began the massive supply of rice seedlings to Bayelsa and Delta states and other south-south regions.

This is as a result of the  rice revolution initiated by the Cross River State governor, Prof Ben Ayade, an automated rice seeds and seedlings factory commissioned in June, 2019.

This supply forms part of the first batch of production worth N3 billion of a N10.8 billion order for the southern states under the auspices of Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN) with the support of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Speaking to newsmen, Prof Ben Ayade disclosed that “the state will also provide all the seedlings support services for the southern part of Nigeria.”

The advantage of this seedling factory according to Prof. Ayade are the mechanisation support and the planting service.

“..mechanisation support and planting services, so indeed what is happening is that Nigeria is gradually migrating from the primitive, rural and African method of rice farming to a civilised modern technology driven farming as your yield will go up, your size of land will be less with maximum yield and your per hectare will move from two tons to ten tons per hectare.”

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About supply payment, he says, “The payment for the supply is not done by individual farmer or state, but coordinated under the RIFAN- CBN program, so that is the way to handle it. Before we make a supply to a state, we receive an order from RIFAN, go to that state, do a valuation of the preparedness of the people and farmers to receive the seedlings,  we then have a list of all the potential recipients farmers and on the basis of that, we compute that into our system and know the quantity that will be loaded to a particular state.”

 “My joy is that the seedlings factory is now a reality. Cross River has a huge challenge of almost converting every single soil that is arable into rice farming because the demand is huge. I am also happy that Nigeria has a great opportunity to see us do the commercial harvesting and now going into full planting to support Bayelsa and others do their rice value chain,” he concluded.