Pick and Write [AgriculturalWord]👉#13||Storage
Storing farm produce has been a challenging task for farmers who are engaged in commercial farming. The challenges has made as many farmers to lose a considerable amount of money. This is often one of the challenges the big time farmers encounter.
Farm produce are generally perishable by their nature. Good storage facility systems are needed to be provided to these big time commercial farmers . Year in and year out, they lost several amounts of money due to poor storage systems.
Writing on this topic, I want to remind everyone about the importance of the provision of good storage systems to farmers.
What is a storage system?
I would be describing storage from the point of agriculture. A Storage system is a facility that is kept in place for the purpose of keeping and preserving agricultural produce. It is used to store crops against to prevent food inflation inflation. That is if prices of food commodities go high, more of these food commodities could be released to the market from the storage facility to drive down the prices.
Another importance is that, during farming season farmers go to the storage houses to get crops or seedlings that they could not obtain from their farm or market. These crops when stored up in the facility, prolongs or preserve the crops to avert its extinction.
For large scale farmers or Government agriculture department, they have storage facilities to store up the farm produce. It may be sited close to the farm or close to the city but must be sited where it would be accessible.
For me as a small scale farmer, I also store some of my crops. Due to not having a good storage facility, I tend to sell and consume most of my crops. Still then, there are some that I would carefully store and preserve for next season planting. I store and preserve the following crops:
- Mellon
- pumpkin seeds
- Okro
- Yam
These are some of the crops I can easily store up. Just as the farming season has started for this year, I'm currently planting some of these crops that I mentioned. Some crops are required to be stored at low temperature while others may require to be stored at a moderate or room temperature.
Where there no much storage facilities for farmers to store their farm produce, it would lead to the importation food commodities. These commodities come at higher prices. The importers would always add every cost incured during the importation of such commodities. By this, the county would be at loss as it would have to spend much money for the importation. If there were to be enough storage facilities to store up those commodities, the huge amount used for importing the commodities would not have been spent.
Having storage facilities in place would avert serious consequences such as food shortage, price increment. it would ensure food commodities would be made available to all both in season and out of season. So farmers should be assisted by everyone in making sure that serious attention is given to establish storage facilities where agriculture commodities could be stored.
I invite the following persons to participate in this contest:
@christabella
@peacemike
@tempestinyang