This is a picture I took in school, a picture of FPY students in their jumpsuit.
My school, Federal University of Agriculture,Abeokuta (FUNAAB) is among the many prestigious and quite popular tertiary institutions in Nigeria, mostly know for agriculture and agro related. I just want to say what is beyond the picture you saw (I will add more pictures)
Currently in my fourth year in uni and it is just practical and it is called Farm Practice Year. I have heard a lot about it and how stressful it could be, but, you know you can know a thing until you have your share of experience. On resumption, the first week was for orientation and the rest is chronicles of works. The first thing we did was to clear bushes with just cutlasses and the bush was over 20 plots of land: we finished clearing the bush in 4 days (about 1,200 students). Then we still burnt the bushes ourselves: we had very draining tasks every single day.
My school is over 10,000 hectares wide, I do not know the actual figure but it is bigger than many communities: even has come villages inside (those that refused to give up their inherited land). There is more than enough land to cultivate, animals are just minimal.
This FPY thing made me know and also get to places I never imagined existed inside the school. Even the common area where the colleges are built, I am yet to know them all. I have been on 5 farms already since I started the FPY and these farms are so big.
The stress that comes with these is that they always find something for us to do. They do not mind telling us to clear bushes that have no plan to use anytime soon. Last week, we were asked to wet over 150 ridges of watermelon and each ridge is about 18 feet long. Though, as student, we still had fun while doing it but it was too tiring.
There was a time we had to make bed to plant vegetables. We had initially cleared the bush with our cutlasses, burnt it but the school used it plough and tiller to prepare the soil. After that, each student was given a 5cm by 5cm plot of land to make 3 beds on the individual plot. It was a really tough task to make bed on a land that has just been ploughed, the land was a very wet and sticky and it had so many big balls of sand packed together. We had to first break those ones then remove every dirt in the soil, there were too many roots and reminant of plants, legume like plant in the soil.
We spent about 6 hours preparing the land for planting, then, we started making the 3 beds. This took about another 4 hours because the land was fresh, had not been exposed to direct sunlight so it was sticky, a clay loamy soil.
We finish all these in 2 days and the next week, we had to get manure to give more nutrients to the soil in another farm far away but still inside the school.
Somedays, we have lectures on the farmland, in the farm houses, in labs or in lecture hall. We get lectured for hours, minimum of 2 hours and I think the longest was about 5 hours straight.
The only thing I really do not like about the FPY is that, there are no significant upgrade in how things are done on the farm. They repeat the tradition, the school and it farm managers teach and direct us like they were also taught some 15 to 30 years ago. Same processes, same techniques and same old ways of doing stuffs. I am really bothered that I would have to go for a better training program after I graduate from this uni, maybe work with a more established and mechanised farm to gain expereince and first hand knowledge before venturing into agricultural businesses.
Once a while, I take pictures on the farm to keep memories and have a history of what I did on farm.
Thank You For Reading Till The End
