The significant roles cassava play in reducing hunger and promoting food security and its emerging value chain development in the country has brought the crop to the limelight as one of the most industrialised and widely consumed tropical crops.

In this article, we bring you steps to yielding maximum profits from cassava cultivation.

Cassava is described as the ‘golden crop of Africa'. The root crop is used in industrial production of high quality flour, starch, glucose, ethanol and animal feeds. It is also processed into various types of food such as garri, lafun and fufu as staples directly consumed at homes and restaurants.

Although, the cassava plant has high potential yield per hectare, the average yield of the crop per hectare of land in Nigeria is however, very low compared with other countries. Nigeria’s yield per hectare ranges between 10 and 15 metric tonnes per hectare.

Whereas, with adequate water and minerals, the plant has the potential to reach 200 metric tonnes per hectare.

How then can Nigeria intensify productivity with the same space and higher yield per hectare?
Below are good farming practices that would dramatically shift the paradigm from low to high yield of the crop.

Quality planting materials
Farmers should select planting materials that are neither too young nor too old, and that are not dry. Improved varieties of cassava should be planted for optimum yield.

The variety should depend on what the farmer wants. If it is for garri, starch, ethanol or cassava flour, there are varieties. Vitamin-A fortified varieties are better used by farmers who want to cultivate for personal processing into various forms of food, these are high yielding and short period varieties.

Mechanisation of farming
Lands should be prepared very well through plowing, ridging and harrowing. These would break the soil and would make a great difference. Cassava roots become bigger in loose and fertile soil. Mechanisation of cassava farming is inevitable if a farmer wants to get optimum yield at a reduced cost. Mechanisation includes the use of standard tractors, plough, harrow, cassava planter (it may be two rolls or four rolls), boom sprayer, cassava cultivator and harvester. Basically, farmers would need to plough and harrow, ridging is not important because complete mechanisation requires harrowed farmland so that cassava planter and harvester could be used.
Mechanically, it takes 45 minutes to plant one hectare, this reduces labour and farmers’ production cost will reduce too. Selecting good and well drained soil, good variety stems and the right planting formation promotes good yield. 0.8m x 1m spacing is recommended, that is, 80cm along the roll and inter-roll spacing should be one metre.

Plant population
Farmers should use a minimum of 70 bundles of cassava stems per hectare using cassava planter. This way, you are sure of getting a minimum of 28 tonnes per hectare if you plant by 0.8m x 1m spacing, with good management.
Optimum plant population is also necessary with 12,500 plants per hectare, and spacing of 1mx80cm. After this, the focus of farmers should be to maintain 10,000 plants by the time of harvest. Everything should be done to protect the plant population.

Read more: http://ismailabdulazeez.org/thread/169/yielding-maximum-profits-cassava-cultivation#ixzz60p1Vi51d