₦airaland Forum

Shoprite is calling on all manufacturers of the shortlisted products below.

It's an opportunity for farmers to add value to their agricultural products and have them displayed on Shoprite's shelves nationwide.

Thank you all for your comments.

I will choose between Rottweiler and Boerboel because they are familiar breeds.

Thanks for the clarification.
God bless!

baldeagle:
This investment scheme is a scam. I have tried it and burnt my fingers. I actually deposited the said amount into Ambubes account. I sent him scanned copies my driver's licence and the teller. Days later someone called me from Ambubes asking why I paid such an amount into their account . I told him it was supposed to be for an agric investment and he told me that thier company is neither involved agriculture nor agricultural product exportation. Rather they are into e-money. He told me it must be a scam. A mumu like me grin grin grin had already fallen for it. He paid in 60k into Ambubes' Account and the scammer (Mr Ojo, I guess) had come with some explanations and presented the mumu's scanned ID card and the teller and was able to collect the money.

When the man at Ambubes saw another deposit (this time, from me) and the scammer came with same with same explanation for collection, he was suspicious. He called the number on the teller (my number) and scheme came into the open. I have been promised the reinbursement of the my money.

The scheme is a lie. Mr Ojo is the scanner. Open ya eyes well well. Was I greedy? Yes. Wanting to reap where I did not sow. Fellow Nairalanders, don't fall into it. I almost had my fingers burnt.

@ JarloDon
What are your findings?
Pls, update us.

JarloDon:
Did you say "bush man"? OK don't forget you said that. I did not abuse you but you have abused me, remember that. Sorry for creating so much heat, that is, if you are genuine. I've sent someone to the business address to confirm it. by Tuesday I'll confirmedly state your actual status. I shall be glad you are as clean as you claim. I hope u know I can easily locate you physically by your I.p. address? my profession makes it that easy. May God save any duper I come across in this country. You will not regret your interest in supporting fellow Nigerians if this is real.

Hi friends,

I'm in the process of acquiring 2 or more guard dogs for my farm in the Southwest, Nigeria.

Which breed should I go for?

Thank you.

Pls, kindly send me more information.
corp12agro(at)gmail.com

More pictures

Before and after visual effect of your favourite movies

I have some dogonyaro leaves that I have soaked in water for over 3 weeks now. (Only dogonyaro leaves). Can I still use it? will it harm my crops since I soaked it for more than 7 days?

This week an American journal called Foreign Affairs has released an excellent collection of essays entitled: “African Farmers in the Digital Age: how digital solutions can enable rural development.”

In this new report, 20 African and global experts discuss ways to transform African agriculture, with a focus on food systems and rural smallholder farmers. A quick summary of a few priorities to speed up change:

# Rethink agricultural policies;
# Expand access to digital technology (to help smallholder farmers carry out business transactions like banking, networking and sourcing info on inputs, innovations, pricing, markets, training, etc.); and
# Improve collaboration and information sharing.

__Most important of all is… wider access to valuable information, which is why I’m telling you about this new report right away!

The report is 141 pages long so I'll share just one excerpt written by Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) which first appeared in this special edition (February 2016):

“. . .Right now, hundreds of millions of Africans rely on farming for a living, but they don’t grow as much—and they don’t sell as much of their surplus—as they could. As a result, Africa had to import $40 billion worth of food last year. Something is not functioning properly when half of the continent’s labor produces food, and the continent still buys its food from somewhere else!

So what is going wrong? Why aren’t African smallholders tapping into that $40 billion market? The main problem stems from the fact that agricultural markets, like banks, exist on a formal plane, whereas smallholders exist on an informal one. So farmers and markets cannot communicate effectively. Smallholders don’t know what the market will pay. They can’t grow crops according to the market’s specifications because they don’t know the specifications. They have no way to learn the farm-management practices that would let them double or even triple their yields. Instead, they grow mostly what they can eat or trade locally, the way they’ve always grown it.

As long as this information disconnect exists, there will be a related physical disconnect. The rails and roads that would take crops from the farm gate to the market don’t exist, because the market doesn’t want the crops the farmers are growing in the ways and volumes they’re growing them. So farmers are isolated, stuck with no money and no voice that the marketplace can hear.

But digital technology can act almost like a secret decoder ring that links the formal and informal sectors. Smallholders are already using mobile phones to communicate within their networks, to talk to family and friends. The institutions that make up the formal marketplace communicate in much the same way. So it is now possible to generate a two-way conversation between Africa’s producers and Africa’s consumers—and this is an entirely new conversation. Each party will be able to express its needs to the other for the first time ever.

Imagine a smallholder farmer who can discover, easily, that yams are expected to fetch a high price this year. She can also contact a local cooperative to combine her yams with those of her neighbor, satisfying the buyers’ volume requirements. Because she is assured of sale at harvest, she can afford to take out a loan, using her phone, to buy fertilizer or better storage or whatever else she needs to maximize her yield. In the meantime, instead of waiting for a visit from an extension worker who may or may not know about yams and the soil in this particular region, she can get advice tailored by crop and soil type via digital video or text.

When information can flow easily, when data is democratized, the cost of doing business in agriculture goes way down, just as transaction costs go way down when financial transactions are digital. The excessive time and money farmers, agribusinesses, and cooperatives spend managing the risk of doing business with unknown partners is a drag on efficiency. When these partners can know each other easily—can function as nodes in a single marketplace—agriculture will thrive.

It’s not as easy as the above paragraphs may make it seem. Building a digital agriculture system that actually accomplishes these goals will take innovation and investment. But the point is that before it wasn’t possible, and now it is. The added variable of digital technology has changed the
agricultural development equation. . .”

You can view and download (free of charge) the full Foreign Affairs special edition on agriculture here: http://fam.ag/20JyIQm

Culled from Strive Masiyiwa's Facebook page.

Please, I need the contact of the registrar of Excel Professional Center in Mokola.

I learnt a lot from the Agriculture Section.
I'm starting farming full-time this year, beginning with 6 acres, with 80% of all knowledge from this section.
I celebrate every contributors who have made this section educative.

Good day,
We currently require about 5 acres of land for immediate purchase in Ibadan.
Anyone who has genuine land should please send an email to corp12agro@gmail.com
Regards!

Source: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/11/buhari-orders-arrest-of-ex-nsa-sambo-dasuki/

There are indication that President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the arrest of the former National Security Adviser, Col Sambo Dasuki (retd).
Operatives of the Department of State Services, DSS, has continued to lay siege to the Abuja residence of the former NSA, against the directives of a Federal High Court.
Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court, Abuja, had on Friday reacted angrily to the siege on Mr. Dasuki’s house despite an earlier ruling he gave permitting the retired colonel to travel abroad for medical treatment.
“My own orders will not be flouted” the judge said on Friday, while re-iterating his stance that the former security chief be allowed to travel for medical treatment.
Details soon.

Source: http://thenationonlineng.net/senate-clerk-is-dead/

Acting Clerk of the Senate Adedotun Durojaiye is dead.

He died late yesterday according to sources. There was no official confirmation as at last night.

Sources said the Lagos-born civil servant had been ill for some time before he died at an Abuja Hospital.

He was promoted as acting clerk of the senate in April 2014. He was in charge of the inauguration of the eighth senate and conducted the elections of principalofficers on June 9 which produced Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy Ike Ekweremadu.

Contact Obasanjo Farms.

Toyota has returned to the top slot in global vehicle sales after releasing figures for the first nine months of the year.
The Japanese carmaker sold 7.5 million in the first three quarters of 2015, beating Volkswagen's 7.43 million and General Motors' 7.2 million.
After six months of the year, VW was ahead of Toyota, in pole position for the first time.
VW's emissions scandal emerged towards the end of September.
The discovery of software that was able to mislead emissions tests on diesel cars may have more effect on VW's sales in the remainder of the year.
Toyota's sales for the first nine months were 1.5% below the level at the same stage last year.
Toyota first overtook GM to take the top slot in 2008 and has kept it every year since, except 2011 when GM was the top seller after a tsunami in north-eastern Japan disrupted Toyota's production.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34635468

musKeeto:
You mean his belief in a book that features talking snakes, a dead God and other stories? Oh well, he should consider running a church, not a government. His beliefs would be put to test and would be limited by the constitution. I can only hope.

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’”. Psalm 14:1
it is a wicked thing to deny God, and a denial of God is often accompanied by a wicked lifestyle.

Photo

Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz emerged as the strongest challengers on Wednesday to insurgent front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson, in a fiery debate that may have marked a new phase in the 2016 race.

With time running short until the first nominating contest in three months, the 10 Republicans in the evening's main debate were anxious to stand out. They frequently talked over each other and the moderators in a debate laced with personal attacks and clashes over tax policy.

In a dominating performance, Rubio, the U.S. senator from Florida, swatted away Jeb Bush when the former Florida governor attacked his attendance record in the Senate.

“Just resign and let someone else take the job,” Bush said, in response to a question about an editorial in a Florida newspaper that blasted Rubio for having missed about one-third of his Senate votes this year.

That prompted Rubio to scold Bush for aligning himself with the liberal media. The only reason Bush was making it an issue, Rubio said, was “because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

The exchange came on a night of heated clashes among candidates fighting to catch Carson and Trump, two upstart candidates who have tapped into voters' frustration with the Republican party's establishment. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, and Trump, a celebrity real estate developer, in a dead heat.

In a sign that the unpredictable Republican race might be entering a new phase, Trump and Carson, while not stumbling, were often eclipsed by Rubio and Cruz during the two-hour debate at the University of Colorado campus.

"Rubio won tonight with wit, good humor, great one-liners and substance," said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to former President George W. Bush.

Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, scored by turning to a well-worn page in the Republican playbook: Attacking the news media. He ignored a question on the debt limit to criticize the CNBC debate moderators for the questions they had posed to candidates.

"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," he said. "This is not a cage match. How about talking about the substantive issues?"

The crowd gathered in an arena in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains roared its approval.

Cruz's response laid bare that a debate that was supposed to be all about the U.S. economy had strayed from the theme repeatedly, so much so that the Republican National Committee took the extraordinary step of criticizing the TV network that broadcast it.

"The performance by the CNBC moderators was extremely disappointing and did a disservice to their network, our candidates, and voters," said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

Social media gave Cruz a positive response. Zoomph, an analytics platform that tracks real-time date on social media, said Cruz scored the highest activity level.

For his part, Trump reiterated his pledge to be a great negotiator as president, pointing out he had persuaded CNBC to shorten the time of the debate "so we could get the hell out of here."

The Republicans seeking their party's nomination for the November 2016 election also clashed over their tax plans, with Carson defending his Bible-inspired proposals and former executive Carly Fiorina vowing to reduce the complicated tax code to three pages.

Carson said his plan, based on religious tithing principles, would get rid of deductions and loopholes and constitute a flat rate of about 15 percent that would be sufficient to fund a sharply reduced government.

"Remember, we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies. Anybody who tells me that we need every penny in every one of those is in a fantasy world," Carson said.

Ohio Governor John Kasich was quick to go on the attack against Trump and Carson, calling their tax plans "a fantasy." Trump's plan for cutting taxes on individuals and corporations has been criticized as an implausible budget-buster by analysts.

"We are on the verge of picking, perhaps, someone who cannot do this job," Kasich said. "You gotta pick somebody who has experience."

The remark appeared aimed at Trump and Carson. But inexperience has been among the key questions hanging over the candidacy of the 44-year-old Rubio, who had struggled in previous debates to emerge from the shadow of other candidates.

He appeared better prepared on Wednesday. When questioned about his personal finances, he responded by pointing to his working-class roots as a Cuban-American in Miami, repeatedly using his personal story as a vehicle for connecting with people struggling to make a living.

“I’m not worried about my finances, I’m worried about the finances of everyday Americans,” Rubio said. “That’s what this debate needs to be about.”

For more on the 2016 presidential race, see the Reuters blog, “Tales from the Trail”

(Additional reporting by Erin McPike, Ginger Gibson, Alana Wise, Megan Cassella and Emily Stephenson; Writing by Steve Holland and John Whitesides; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Ken Wills)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/29/us-usa-election-idUSKCN0SM2M820151029

The Chinese Government to allow all couples to have two children as ‘response to an ageing population’ and amid concerns over economy.

China has scrapped its one-child policy, allowing all couples to have two children for the first time since draconian family planning rules were introduced more than three decades ago.

The announcement followed a four-day Communist party summit in Beijing where China’s top leaders debated financial reforms and how to maintain growth at a time of heightened concerns about the economy.

China will “fully implement a policy of allowing each couple to have two children as an active response to an ageing population”, the party said in a statement published by Xinhua, the official news agency. “The change of policy is intended to balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing population,”

Some celebrated the move as a positive step towards greater personal freedom in China. But human rights activists and critics said the loosening – which means the Communist party continues to control the size of Chinese families – did not go far enough.

“The state has no business regulating how many children people have,” said William Nee, a Hong Kong-based activist for Amnesty International.


“If China is serious about respecting human rights, the government should immediately end such invasive and punitive controls over people’s decisions to plan families and have children.”

For months there has been speculation that Beijing was preparing to abandon the divisive family planning rule, which was introduced in 1980 because of fears of a population boom.

Demographers in and outside China have long warned that its low fertility rate – which experts say lies somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 children a woman – was driving the country towards a demographic crisis.

Since 2013, there has been a gradual relaxation of China’s family planning laws that already allowed minority ethnic families and rural couples whose firstborn was a girl to have more than one child.

Thursday’s announcement that all couples would be allowed two children caught many experts by surprise.

“I’m shaking to be honest,” said Stuart Gietel-Basten, an University of Oxford demographer who has argued for the end of the one-child policy. “It’s one of those things that you have been working on and saying for years and recommending they should do something and it finally happened. It’s just a bit of a shock.”


The Communist party credits the policy with preventing 400m births, thus contributing to China’s dramatic economic takeoff since the 1980s.

But the human toll has been immense, with forced sterilisations, infanticide and sex-selective abortions that have caused a dramatic gender imbalance that means millions of men will never find female partners.

“The gender imbalance is going to be a very major problem,” warned Steve Tsang, a professor of contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham. “We are talking about between 20 million and 30 million young men who are not going to be able to find a wife. That creates social problems and that creates a huge number of people who are frustrated.”

History showed that countries with a very large number of unmarried men of military age were more likely to pursue aggressive, militarist foreign policy initiatives, Tsang said.

In one of the most shocking recent cases of human rights abuses related to the once-child policy, a woman who was seven months pregnant was abducted by family planning officials in Shaanxi province in 2012 and forced to have an abortion.

Opponents say the policy has created a demographic “timebomb”, with China’s 1.3 billion-strong population ageing rapidly, and the country’s labour pool shrinking. The UN estimates that by 2050 China will have about 440 millionpeople over 60. The working-age population – those between 15 and 59 – fell by 3.71 million last year, a trend that is expected to continue.

From a political, pragmatic perspective, loosening the policy is good for the party
Stuart Gietel-Basten, demographer

There were no immediate details on how or when China’s new “two-child policy” would be implemented. But Gietel-Basten said the policy change was good news for both China’s people and its leaders, who stood to gain from ending a highly unpopular rule.

“From a political, pragmatic perspective, loosening the policy is good for the party but also it is a good thing for individual couples who want to have that second child. It is a kind of win-win for everybody,” he said.

“Millions of ordinary Chinese couples will be allowed to have a second child if they want to – this is clearly a very positive thing.”

Experts said the relaxation of family planning rules is unlikely to have a lasting demographic impact, particularly in urban areas where couples were now reluctant to have two children because of the high cost.

“Just because the government says you can have another child, it doesn’t mean the people will immediately follow,” said Liang Zhongtang, a demographer at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science.

Gietel-Basten said: “In the short term, probably there will be a little baby boom particularly in some of the poorer provinces where the rules have been very strict, like in Sichuan or in parts of the south. But in the long term I don’t think it’s going to make an enormous amount of difference.”

Dai Qing, a Chinese writer who has publicly called for all family planning rules to be scrapped, said the announcement was a positive step.

“It shows that the authorities have understood the changes in the total population and the demographic structure and started to address them,” she said.

But Dai said questions remained, particularly about how Beijing would enforce its new two-child policy.

“Even if people are allowed to have two children, what if they want to have three children or more? What if unmarried women want to have their own children? At the end of the day, it’s about women’s reproductive rights and freedoms.”

They should abolish the family planning system. Only that way can they straighten out their relationship with the people
Liang Zhongtang, demographer
Others expressed concern that the announcement of the new two-child policy, which referred to Chinese couples, suggested children born outside of wedlock would continue to be penalised by the government.

Liang called on the Communist party to completely dismantle its unpopular and outdated family planning rules.

“I think they should abolish the family planning [system] once for all and let people decide how many children they want to have. Only that way can they straighten out their relationship with the people.”

But Gietel-Basten said it would have been virtually unthinkable for Beijing to completely abandon its family planning rules.

“That would in some ways imply that the policy was wrong … which of course would be a smack in the face of the last two generations of policymakers who stuck by it,” he said.

“Getting rid of it completely probably wasn’t an option in the short term. But in the long term it’s certainly not inconceivable that they would move towards a pronatalist policy at some point, maybe over the next five or 10 years, and that they would develop policies similar to in Korea or in Taiwan, or in Hong Kong or in Singapore, where there would be incentives for couples with one child to have a second child. I certainly think that is the future direction it [policy] is likely to go in.”

As news that the notorious policy was coming to an end spread on Thursday, Chinese citizens celebrated on social media, while also lamenting how long change had taken to arrive.

Some government critics expressed their contempt for the policy by altering photographs of the red Communist party propaganda banners that adorn towns and villages across China urging residents to obey family planning rules.

“We reward families with two children and fine those with only one,” read one spoof poster mocking Beijing’s change of heart. “Those who decide not to have children or who are infertile should be thrown in jail.”

Additional reporting by Luna Lin

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/29/china-abandons-one-child-policy

Watch the video on youtube


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHPvsLlZnG4

Scott Brown has done it again. Two months after making a hole-in-one while playing with Tiger Woods in the final round of the Wyndham Championship, Brown made another ace on Thursday in the first round of the CIMB Classic. Check out the shot from 189 yards on No. 15 that goes into the hole with some serious pace:

Incredibly, Brown also made two holes-in-one in 2014, one at Colonial and one at the Deutsche Bank Championship. So that's four in less than a year and a half that span three consecutive PGA Tour seasons. The guy is the tour's undisputed king of aces.

After the hole-in-one in August that drew a high-five from Tiger, Brown said, "that one will top the rest of them." But we're not sure if that's the case anymore. Did you see the car he won on Thursday?

http://www.golfdigest.com/story/scott-brown-makes-another-hole-in-one-is-the-pga-tours-king-of-aces