Sarfo Akwasi Acheampong, a cocoa farmer, will be among 15 farmers that will be presented with awards at the 38th National Farmers’ Day in the Bono region.
This year’s event is being organised under the theme ‘Accelerating Agriculture Development through Value-Addition’ .
This year’s celebration had to be reviewed by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture due to the current global economic crises and national constraints.
The awards at the regional level have been reduced to the Overall regional Best Farmer, the 1st and 2nd Runner-Up National Best farmers, the regional Best Livestock Farmer and the regional Best Crop Farmer.
The rest are the regional Best Cocoa Farmer, regional Best Most Promising Young Cocoa Farmer, regional Best Most Enterprising Cocoa Female Farmer and regional Best Coffee Farmer.
Celebrations at the regional level have been restored as a cost-cutting strategy to ease the financial burden on the 16 Regional Coordinating Councils which hitherto bore the cost of paying for travel expenses, accommodation and lodging of regional award winners and other accompanying officials to participate in the celebration at the national level.
There will be five regional award categories per region, namely the Regional Best Farmer, Regional Best Livestock Farmer, Regional Best Crop Farmer, Regional Best Fisher and Regional Best Agricultural Extension Agent.
The district award categories have been revised from six to three, namely District Best Farmer; District Best Livestock Farmer and District Best Crop Farmer.
According to the Public Relations officer of the Ministry, Bagbara Tanko, “Value-Added Agriculture is a movement that has created a life of its own because it is an idea that has the potential to change production agriculture to a more meaningful product.“Changing a raw agricultural product into something new goes through processing, drying, extracting or any other type of process that differentiates the product from the original raw produce,” he added.