In the quest to boost food production, President Bola Tinubu, on Thursday, mandated the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF) to spearhead the deployment of 10,000 John Deere tractors across Nigeria.
The initiative will commence with an initial rollout of 2,000 units scheduled for Q1/Q2 2025 and scaling up to 10,000 over the next five years.
The Executive Secretary of NADF, Mohammed Ibrahim, on the sidelines of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU with John Deere, at the headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in Abuja, disclosed that 2, 000 tractors will arrive Lagos port before the wet season farming commences.
Ibrahim said: “The National Agricultural Development Fund, NADF, as we have mentioned earlier, has been mandated to implement one of the four mechanization programmes of the Federal Government of Nigeria, led by His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who in his aspiration to see that Nigeria transits from a monolithic economy and see that agriculture becomes what it is.
“We have various mechanization programmes, so the NADF is implementing one.The one we are implementing is the John Deere 2, 000 tractors.
“This entails everything, the normal contract terms and conditions of this implementation of this programme. The plan, henceforth, as we mentioned, we got the conveyance of the Federal Executive Council in October 2024 and we have taken three months to go on a very robust, intensive negotiation with John Deere.
“We have also had a stakeholder engagement hosted by a mechanization international partner, Haifa, where we invited various mechanization stakeholders, understood where the main points are, where the successes are, and where the learning should be.
“This will now drive us to conclude on the implementation programme. The John Deere tractors hopefully will be delivered before the wet season.”
Also, the NADF boss said to fast-track the process, the Fund has signed MoU with the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA).
“We have also gone in to get into another MoU with the Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, who would hopefully provide the John Deere AGCOMS International Trading Limited, who have signed the contract with, a space within the ports or close to the ports where they would set up their assembly plant, and then hopefully have these tractors delivered to the various parts of this country as will be contained in the implementation programme.”
Meanwhile, the Country Director of AGCOMS International Trading Limited, Engr Okoli Chijioke, whose company is the sub-dealers of John Deere Tractors in the country, explained that the MoU with NADF is $70 million for the 2,000 tractors expected before the wet season farming.
“On the 1st of October, 2024, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu mentioned that there is an assembly plant attached to the John Deere Tractors acquisition, and that is actually a fact and it is something that would actually not just only help the assembly of these 2,000 tractors but also give our own youths the opportunity to understand the technology behind what we are trying to assemble because bringing in any piece of equipment you want, whether you like it or not, until you have a plan for continuity with respect to product support and that whole aim is defeated.
“So the assembly plant plays a very crucial role because the people that will be opportune to go through the process with us will have the opportunity of having first-hand visibility on what it takes to put it together.
“So we can be rest assured that this unit can confidently give us years, possibly decades of actual work on the field. So the total procurement value is about $70 million, and that is the value to get it down to the collection center in Abuja and Lagos for the first two years,” Chijioke said.
The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Sentor Abubakar Kyari, also commended NADF for the milestone achieved by signing the MoU with AGCOMS International Trading Limited, a company which is the sub-dealers of John Deere Tractors.
According to Kyari, the Federal Executive Council is backing up the MoU and the tractors would be in the country, and he said with this mechanisation effort in the agricultural sector, young Nigerians will be attracted to agribusiness.
However, he tasked NADF to achieve the arrival and distribution of the tractors to farmers before the wet season farming, and should sustain the tempo.
