Conduct proper soil survey before planting, says FUNAAB don

A Professor of Soil Physics and Soil Conservation, Prof. Mutiu Busari, has urged farmers in the country to conduct proper soil survey before planting any crop. He made this known while featuring on a live Yoruba interactive programme, ‘Agbedotun’ on the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), Ogun State, FUNAAB Radio, 89.5FM.
Prof. Busari said doing proper soil survey would avail farmers the opportunity to know the right conditions of land by preventing them from incurring any financial loss. The don, who is of the Department of Soil Science and Land Management, College of Plant Science and Crop Production (COLPLANT), revealed that the Federal Government had identified soil survey as one of the challenges facing farmers in the country. He added that the Federal Government, through the Nigerian Institute of Soil Science, had been trying to establish soil testing laboratories across the six geo-political zones of the country in order to ease their burden.
He noted that there is an ongoing campaign that encourages farmers to embrace organic agriculture, saying “though organic fertiliser is soil-friendly, but farmers should encourage the use of organic and synthetic fertilisers”. Prof. Busari, however, urged farmers to plant cover crops, desist from leaving their soil surface bare, and engage in crop rotation, to preserve soil nutrients.
He also emphasised that there is an ongoing research activity in FUNAAB called SmartSoil, which involves digital mapping of soil nutrients of Southwest, Nigeria, stressing that the outcome of this study will address farmers’ worry about soil nutrient management as they would be able to obtain information about their soil nutrient status and crop suitability, using their smart phones. He added that the SmartSoil project is one of the Third Party Project (TPP) of the Accelerating Inclusive Green Growth through Agri-based Digital Innovations in West Africa (AGriDI) under the coordination of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Kenya.