The field day, begun with a tour of the 3,000 acres of maize, 300 acres of soya bean, 10 acres of rice, six acres of sesame and five acres of sorghum fields cultivated by the Gohuoballe Agric and Business (GAB) Ventures; a group of farmers in the district.

It was climaxed with a short durbar with the enthusiastic farmers at the main farm site.

Speaking at the durbar, Madam Elorm Goh, Executive Director of Agrisolve thanked the farmers for their commitment to work towards the actualization of their dream of moving from peasant farming to commercial farming.

Touching on the genesis of the partnership, Madam Goh noted that the farmers had strong will but lacked the capacity to produce desired quantities that would enable them buy to serve the needs of industry.

She said it was based on this that Agrisolve decided on a backward integration approach where they would support hardworking farmer groups such as GAB Ventures to produce in large quantities, some of the produce they needed to serve industry.

"The farmers need support in terms of improved seed, fertilizer, technology and technical support on best agronomic practices to enable them increase production, hence, the idea behind the partnership to produce together and make sure all their produce reach the market", she said.

The Agrisolve Executive Director noted that through the partnership, they have invested heavily in technology to help increase production while reducing the aggregation stress.

She said for three years now, there had been progress, pointing out that last year recovery rate was over 90 per cent.

Madam Goh bemoaned some challenges hindering the sector including non-coordinated market structures, lack of appropriate agriculture infrastructure, high cost of transportation and bad roads to the Sissala area where a lot of farming was going on.

She added that agriculture was time bound and any delay of input to the farmer would affect productivity and called for proper coordination of the fertilizer subsidy policy to ensure easy access by farmers.

Mr Willian Kortey, Managing Director of the Regional Marketing Group (RMG) noted that they provided technical support to the farmers for them to get the best out of the inputs they used.

"Any farmer doing the right thing on the farm now can get over 40 bags of maize per acre", he said and added that once farmers improve their knowledge on best practices through the technology they provided, they would keep making profit.

Kuoro Bamula Basinjia Chieminah III, the Chief of Kandia appealed for more planters, fertilizer application machines, combine harvesters, and continued farmer education on new technology to help the farmer increase productivity with less stress.

Mr John Dimah, Team Leader of GAB Ventures appealed to the farmers to honour their commitments immediately after harvesting to ensure a 100 per cent recovery rate so they could continue to sustain the partnership between them and Agrisolve.

Other partner organisations included Pure and Perfect, USAID-ADVANCE. Yara Ghana, and MTN.