The second phase of Green Gold Farms’ initiatives is to increase our crop production from 400 acres in the Mion District, Northern Region.
To do so, we need to scale up our land development activities, where we had to come up with creative and innovative ways to capture and take into consideration the erratic weather patterns in the Northern Region. When done properly, we can plant 2 or 3 times more in a year instead of 1 cycle. Which means we need access to a stable source of water, proper irrigation systems to support an all-year-round production.
From our analyses on the typography, proximity and the rainfall patterns in the region, we settled on the Zakpalsi community, which is about 5 km from our soybean farm in Sekpe. Further assessment revealed that the community had a dam used by the locals, and stretching down from the dam was a small stream that continues downstream towards the Sekpe township, which runs through our farm. Another observation made was that the dam and stream never dried up even in very arid dry weather conditions, as compared to other water bodies in the region during the dry season. Also, the earth close to the banks of the stream were still wet in this season. Which means we are unlikely to need water for the crops at the initial stage of planting since there will be moisture in the soil for the plants to thrive. All these reasons made Zakpalsi the ideal site for our land development project.
After settling on the location, we started clearing 1,200 acres of the land along the dam and the stream. So far, we have cleared 120 acres, which means we are behind schedule. We have decided to outsource 600 acres of the land clearing to another contractor to complete the clearing faster within the next 30 days.
Our strategy is to have some dugouts along the stream at various intervals. These dugouts will run deep enough to collect water and when it overflows, will join back to the stream to be carried along to our farms for irrigation.
After clearing the 1200 acres, we are going to make use of the dugout that we will create along the stream to irrigate the cleared land for planting. We will adopt different irrigation practices on the new land site such as the sprinkler irrigation system and also use gravity and booster pumps to collect the water at a central point for irrigation.
After clearing the land, we will run levels and identify the high points and low points. The high points will help us lift water and put in tanks and use gravity to send the water to the crops. The low points will make it easier to lift water from the dugout directly to the plants.
We concluded our inspection by meeting with the contractor who will do the extra land clearing, the electrical engineers to pull electricity to the site, and representatives from the Ghana Water Authority who will provide us with the pump size to set up our irrigation system.
All in all, it was a great meeting, and we will keep you posted on our progress!
