• Friday, April 19, 2024
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Tractorisation dream for Nigeria from Port Harcourt

Tractorization dream for Nigeria from Port Harcourt

You are a modern farmer with some hectares of land good for maize, cucumber, ginger, tomato, pepper, lettuce, or so. You go to iriebe in PH and ask Bob Track to show around for modern tractors that do wonders.

Bob Tract produces 60 a day on a low tide but can do 120 when orders are many. They are asking the FG to challenge them with 1000. Their tractors are rated the best in the world because it won in the US. This is because it was designed to take care of climatic conditions and harsh weather in Africa such as salty soil, stumps, virgin lands with obstacles, etc.

The African market is seen around the world as a junk market. This is because there are no strong regulations that block unethical practice, such that with some bribe, the manufacturer gets away with evil, but Bob Track led by Rivers-born Ibifiri Bobmanuel with many foreign partners said he decided to do the right thing.

So, they about five years doing back and forth with the US to develop the Bob Track model that turned out to be world challenger, if not world beater.

You pick a 120 horsepower model that even your wife can operate while listening to music on steering. It comes with air-conditioners and GPRS that enables the operator to map the land in question and calculate the time needed to get it ploughed or planted.

Read also: FG urged to address insecurity to boost food supply, reduce prices

In Africa, the cost of tractor is already high considering the economic power of the farmer. So, the way out is for some farmers to come together and buy one, but the problem of how to know how much work the tractor did for each owner poses huge trouble. So, GPRS that maps and calculates the farm before work is introduced.

Bob Track is ushering in tractors that last for up 40 years through service guarantee and robust orientation. This is to save Nigeria from the littering of the land with tractors that never lasted for more than three years because they are not meant for the African climate.

Nigeria has very low yield per hectare due to absence of fertilizer and non-mechanisation.

According to Bobmanuel, today, Nigeria’s tractorisation dept is lower than 0.5%, which means that if we bring in tractorisation the GDP would triple (grow by about 300 per cent). This must be the study the FG came up with almost a decade ago and came up with Green Imperative which required 100,000 tractors to be unleashed on the nation beginning with 10,000 from Brazil in a $1.1Bn loan deal.

The CBN helps in seedling and fertilizers but tractorisation and mechanization seem forgotten. So, the best seeds and fertilizer will fail on hard soil if tractors are not unleashed on the nation’s farms.

Its tractorisation and mechanization that can attract the youths into the farms, boost food security, earn income and boost export. The best tractors in Africa that shocked the US are made in PH, at Iriebe, to be precise. Want to go to PAMO Medical University in PH? Then see Bob Track just before it.