Recipe Of The Day: How to Prepare Goat Meat Pepper Soup

Pepper soup is basically meat in a spiced stock, the exceptional taste originates from the flavor blend. pepper soup is normally made with goat meat or catfish. Making pepper soup is super easy, to the extent you have the pre-blended spice mix.

Ingredients

• 3 teaspoons Pepper soup spice mix (Pepper Soup Mix: Buy it in UKR|RUS|PLN in EUR)
• 2 tea =spoons dry blended hot chilli
• Goat meat ( 10 small pieces)(cleaned)
• 3 cubes Maggi
• salt to taste
• small onion, small ginger and garlic (peeled, not cut)

Ogun and the quest to boost food production

Ogun State Government is truly shifting focus to agriculture in the belief that it would be good for all Nigerians to cultivate the land for products that would serve local and international consumption.
That is why the government has expressed displeasure at the colossal waste of scarce resource on the importation of food that the country has capacity to produce, a development that has impacted negatively on the nation’s economy as it fuels domestic inflation, displaces the local production and creates rising unemployment in the nation.

Governor Ibikunle Amosun, while declaring open this year’s National Council on Agriculture and Rural Development meeting with the theme: “From Farm to Table: Developing Agricultural Value Chain to create Wealth and Jobs and Assure National Food Security”, held in Abeokuta, Ogun State, had lamented that “it is rather unfortunate that despite the abundant agricultural potentials and the comparative advantage that the nation as the production of many crops, Nigeria still imports over N1.3trillion worth of wheat, rice, sugar and fish every year. Our country, Nigeria, is said to be the world largest importer of United States’ hard, red and white winter wheat and second largest importer of rice’’, the Governor said.

He added that for Nigeria to become an agricultural industrialised economy, agriculture should be seen as a viable business venture and very well funded.

Therefore, due to the effort of the government to give more attention to agriculture, a Model Farm Estate aimed at resuscitating the farm settlement concept of the defunct Western Region of Nigeria was established at Owowo near Abeokuta, to encourage youth involvement in sustainable agriculture.
This is just one of the many projects the government is embarking on, and in the nearest future, the state will become the country’s food basket.

•Deborah Odulate, Ogun State Ministry of Agriculture, Abeokuta.

Nigeria: Boosting Food Security Through Mechanisation, the Way Forward for Nigeria

The present administration has come up with the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) in a bid to earn foreign exchange from agriculture and make the nation self-sufficient in food production. But, with the continual drift of the young population of young Nigerians moving away from the rural areas to the urban in search of white collar jobs and away from the drudgery of manual farm labour, self sufficiency in food production is becoming a herculean task.

Seasonal shortage of food is becoming apparent as a result despite the fact that many labourers lack the incentive or tools to perform the high quality work needed to improve productivity. So, feeding the increasing population cannot be done with the cutlass and hoe or an agricultural system that relies on human muscles. In developed countries, mechanisation has taken over from the use of raw human power as is still the case in Nigeria.

The policy challenges of mechanisation, or lack of it, are of far reaching significance. The use of poorly-yielding varieties of planting materials even compound the problem further as crops yields across the nation have remained relatively stagnant and low over time, posing serious policy challenges that require urgent intervention. Agricultural mechanisation, embracing the use of tools, implements, and machines for a wide range of farm operations such as land preparation, planting, harvesting, on-farm processing among others, therefore becomes desirable.

There is an added dimension of soil, water and forest conservation practices that need to be built into the larger framework of environmental impact of agriculture, climate change and food security. The constraint posed by the prevailing land tenure system on mechanisation is such that agricultural lands in many parts of Nigeria are not easily made available for farming because of extant influences such as ownership structure and the stiff competition for estate development today, which is exerting dangerous influence on agriculture and the prospect of feeding the nation.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reckons that Nigeria is still at the early stage of agricultural mechanisation; even at that, it notes that the mechanisation of power-intensive operations has been slow. A significantly higher proportion of farming area is still cultivated by hand tools in Nigeria and West Africa compared to other developing countries

Statistics had it that, last year, a total of 3,012,360 ha of land was expected to be put under cultivation in the Nigeria with a tractor population of about 40,000 with a tractorisation density of 0.1 hp/ha. The tractorisation density of the country fell short of the recommended 1.5hp/ha by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). For Nigeria to be able to feed its growing population, therefore, there is a need for investment in mechanisation both on the part of the private and public sectors.

Source