Agriculture: Meaning, Importance, Branches

What you need to know

• Agriculture is the deliberate cultivation of crops and the rearing of animals for food, raw materials and income, together with the processing and distribution of those products. The definition has three parts, crops, animals and the handling of the produce, and WAEC expects all three.
• Agriculture is both an art and a science. It is an art in the practical skills of ridging, pruning, grafting and milking that are learned by doing, and a science in the application of soil chemistry, genetics, nutrition and entomology to raise output.
• Agriculture employs roughly a third of Nigeria's labour force and contributes about a quarter of gross domestic product, making it the largest single employer in the country even though most farms are under two hectares.
• It provides food for the population: yam, cassava, maize, rice, sorghum, millet, cowpea, plantain, vegetables, fish, beef, mutton, chicken and eggs. A country that cannot feed itself must spend scarce foreign exchange on food imports such as wheat and rice.
• It supplies raw materials to industry: cotton to textile mills in Kaduna and Kano, cocoa to beverage and chocolate factories, oil palm to soap, margarine and cooking oil plants, groundnut to oil mills, hides and skins to the Kano tanneries, rubber to tyre makers, and maize and soya bean to feed mills.
• It earns foreign exchange. Cocoa, sesame, cashew, rubber, ginger and hibiscus are exported, and diversifying export earnings away from crude oil depends directly on raising agricultural output and quality.
• It generates government revenue through export duties, value added tax on processed produce and company tax on agro-allied firms, and it provides capital for other sectors when farm savings are invested elsewhere.
• It creates a market for industrial goods. Farmers buy fertiliser, agrochemicals, improved seed, knapsack sprayers, tractors, drugs and vaccines, so a healthy farm sector keeps those industries alive.
• It supports rural development. Where farming is profitable, feeder roads, markets, boreholes, storage and schools follow, and rural to urban migration slows because young people can earn a living at home.
• Crop production, or agronomy, deals with field crops; horticulture deals with garden crops and divides into olericulture for vegetables, pomology for fruits and floriculture for flowers and ornamentals.
• Animal production or animal husbandry covers cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry and rabbits. Within it, apiculture is bee keeping, sericulture is silkworm rearing, heliciculture is snail farming and aquaculture or fish farming is the rearing of catfish and tilapia.
• Agricultural engineering handles farm tools, machinery, irrigation, drainage, farm structures and processing equipment; soil science deals with soil formation, fertility and conservation; agricultural economics deals with costs, records, marketing and farm management; agricultural extension carries research findings to farmers; forestry manages trees and woodland; and veterinary medicine treats and prevents animal disease.
• Nigerian agriculture is still dominated by subsistence farming on small, fragmented holdings using the hoe and cutlass, under rain-fed conditions, with low yields. Commercial farming on larger holdings with mechanisation, irrigation and improved varieties exists but is a minority of farms.
• Farming systems in Nigeria include shifting cultivation, bush fallowing or land rotation, mixed cropping, mixed farming where crops and livestock are kept together, monocropping, crop rotation, taungya where food crops are grown among young forest trees, and plantation agriculture for cocoa, oil palm and rubber.