Agriculture And Entrepreneurship Part 1 || Challenges of Agriculture|| By @ chiiheanyichi

Hello everyone am so delighted to write again on this platform. I hope all of us are doing well. The topic of today's writing is Challenges of Agriculture As Means of Entrepreneurship.

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I will like to start by telling us the meaning of agriculture.

Agriculture

Agriculture is the science and art of growing crops, rearing of animals and processing of farm and animal produce into useable form for the benefit and useful of man and his surrounding.

From my definition of agriculture, it means that agriculture does not only base on crop farming nor rearing of animals but also extends into the process of processing those crop and animal produce into the form and manner in which it can be used by man.
Agriculture can be practiced in different forms.
An agricultural farmer who grows crops and rears animal in small units or quantity which will only be sufficient for him and his family is known as a Subsistence farmer while the one who grows in large quantities that he can be sold in a local market is a semi subsistence farmer. There are some agricultural farmers who grows crops in a very large quantity that it can be sold within and outside the country as foreign exchange, they are called Commercial farmers.

Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur is a person who establishes his own business enterprise, controls and manages the running of the business. An entrepreneur doesn't depend on any establishment for work rather he/she creates work.
In other words, an entrepreneur is a creator of employment and also an employer of labour. An entrepreneur must be business minded and oriented not giving in to compromise no matter the situation.

That is to say that entrepreneurship is an act of being an entrepreneur.

Agriculture And Entrepreneurship

Knowledge and practice of agriculture can make one an entrepreneur. This is because a farmer who engages in agricultural practice is already self employed and will also need other hands in the production process thereby providing employment to the unemployed.

Is quite unfortunate that people neglects this aspect of job creation. The question is why is this area neglected or ignored by many especially the young ones ?

This is because agriculture is regarded as a low tech practice. Agriculture are often practiced in the rural areas order than the urban where there is high population density of youths. This is so because there is more availability of land in the rural areas than in the urban areas and this seems to pose a challenging factor in agricultural practice.

Secondly, agricultural practice seems to be tedious because most of its activities are manually carried out. This will lead us into some problems of agriculture.

Some Challenges of Agriculture

Agriculture are faced with alot of challenges. The major challenges of agriculture include:

• Unavailability of land
• Inadequate farming facilities
• Economic instability
• Bad roads
• Poverty
• Difficulty in accessing credit facilities, among others.

1 Unavailability of Land : Due to some commercial institutions and industries like markets, schools, banks etc, have made the availability of land difficult. Some land which should have been used for agricultural practice has been occupied by commercial and industrial establishments.

2 Inadequate Farming Facilities : Most of farm tools and implement are insufficient thereby creating a problem in agricultural sector. Sometimes, when these tools are available, they tends to be unaffordable by the farmers due to high cost of the products.

3 Economic Instability: Due to the uncertainties in the economic sector, it have made it a very big problem for agriculture to move forward. Fluctuations in prices of farm inputs have really posed a very big challenge to farmers especially the poor farmers.

4 Bad Roads : Poor construction of roads is a very big challenge so long as agriculture is concern. The roads that leads to most farms are poorly constructed and this makes it difficult for farmers to transport their farm produce from the place of production to the place of marketing.

5 Poverty: Most farmers are poor and therefore cannot produce much. The poverty state of some farmers is the major set back in agriculture. Subsidies and loans should be given to such farmers in order to move agriculture to the next level it should be.

5 Difficulty in Accessing Credit Facilities: Some farmers are not able to access credit facilities such as grant and loans. Farmers miss grant offered by government due to deformations, lack of agricultural education which will enlighten the farmers.
Most farmers cannot access loans due to demands of collateral from financial institutions. Since most of them cannot provide a collateral they are denied from getting loans.
Secondly, high interest rates imposed on the farmers by financial institutes makes it very uneasy for assessment of loans.

Conclusion

In conclusion, agriculture is an important sector which can create employment, thereby some of these challenges faced by Agriculturist should be solve as it will help levitate poverty and by so doing cut if not eliminate crime I our society.

I will want appreciate you for your support, most especially @xkool24 and @hisgeneral for their contributions; God bless you.

Cc:
@xkool24
@hisgeneral