Kofi Boa
Director

Center for No-Till Agriculture
Ghana

No-till Promotion Among Smallholder Farmers - My Experience

I am the youngest of four children of a farming family and I grew up on the farm in an area where slashing and burning had been the main land preparation practice for crop production. The family cocoa farm which was our main source of income got burnt when I was 12 years old and life became very bitter for the family. At that younger age, I vowed to fight the use of fire on the farmland which led me to become interested in planting directly through the slashed mulch on an untilled land popularly called "proka" in the local Akan language. "Proka" literary means no-till. I started no-tillage farming and went to school to study agriculture both in Ghana and in the United States of America. I have lived my life as a farmer, agricultural research scientist, extensionist and a trainer in the smallholder farming system and a lot of impacts have been created through that. I founded the Center for No-Till Agriculture to illustrate the benefits and evidence of No-Tillage farming at Amanchia in Ghana in 2012 and the Center continues to make progress in the promotion of No-Tillage through research, extension and training.