Golden Agri Inputs : Driving Nigeria’s agricultural productivity

Sustainably feeding Nigeria and realising the country’s promise of agro-led industrialisation demands the transformation of productivity conditions in agriculture.

At its essence, productivity entails generating greater output from a given quantity of mobilised resources.

In the case of Agriculture – and specifically, Crop Production (which is 72 percent of Agriculture GDP) – productivity is largely expressed in the yield per hectare derived from the production of crops on already mobilised arable land.

Therefore, a successful productivity transformation entails significant and sustained improvements in yield per hectare across crop value chains, tilting the demand-supply balance in the direction of production surpluses that stabilise domestic food security conditions over time and make agro-led industrialisation viable.

Golden Agri Inputs Limited (GAIL), a subsidiary of Flour Mills of Nigeria (FMN), derives its sense of mission from this national imperative.

Founded in 1997, GAIL’s flagship business, Golden Fertilizer Company Limited, has, through quality, innovation, and intensive engagement with Nigerian farmers across regions and agroecological zones, established leadership over the past 25 years as the premier blended NPK fertilizer brand in the country.

The company is today evolving into a comprehensive agricultural inputs business offering a bouquet of yield-enhancing solutions to smallholder farmers across the country.

These solutions run across the gamut of crop genetics (seed), nutrition (fertilisation), and agronomy – the essential elements of the crop yield and, therefore, yield transformation equation.

The story of this strategic evolution begins with GAIL’s base fertilizer business, where it is accelerating innovation to further enhance the quality of its blended fertilizer products and to extend these offerings to include special and crop-specific blends.

At GAIL, innovation unfolds through a systemic process that fuses information gleaned from engagement with farmers, analysis of soil characteristics, profile, and conditions, and the documentation of crop variety characteristics into insights that inform the science behind the development of suitable fertilizer blends to drive up crop yield.

Through this process, GAIL has developed a variety of farmers’ choice blends that range from general-purpose to special blends, which are demonstrably suitable for a wide range of crops grown across Nigeria’s various agroecological zones.

Lately, GAIL’s innovation apparatus has harnessed its product development capabilities to create crop-specific blends, commencing with a recently introduced special Soyabean Fertilizer blend, which is already showing promise in lifting soyabean yields in trial locations.

Mindful that yield transformation extends beyond crop nutrition, GAIL has extended its portfolio of input products into the agricultural seed space.

Nigeria has had a longstanding need for a robust, indigenous national seed system capable of regularly developing yield-improving seed varieties.

However, the institutional conditions conducive to building this critical national capability at scale only started crystallising in recent years, with the enactment of the National Agricultural Seeds Act of 2019 and the allied Plant Variety Protection Act of 2021.

The latter, especially, an intellectual property protection mechanism consistent with global conventions, enhances the incentive structure for the commercial proliferation of promising indigenous seed varieties.

Encouraged by this, GAIL commenced independent commercial seed development in 2024, building on its capabilities through its experience in driving the proliferation of the heat-resistant Borlaug-100 wheat seed variety as a catalyst for increasing yields in local wheat cultivation.

As a subsidiary of Flour Mills, a company which has consistently met Nigerians’ need for wheat-based carbohydrates from flour to pasta to noodles and semolina for decades, GAIL is at the forefront of efforts to stimulate domestic production of wheat (which Nigeria predominantly imports), committing significant resources to incentivise local farmers to embrace wheat cultivation by facilitating access to climate-suitable wheat seed varieties and providing agronomic support to maximise wheat yields.

Despite enormous challenges, capacity is being incrementally built. In Jigawa, through collaboration with the State Government, adoption of wheat cultivation by local farmers is growing, with reported improvements in yield from a tonne per hectare, which approximates the national average, to 3.5 tonnes per hectare among a cross-section of farmers.

GAIL is now adapting the capabilities acquired through the ongoing wheat programme – including seed breeding and quality control monitoring, seed adaptation, trialing and certification – to hybrid seed development in other grains such as maize and soybean, grains which Nigeria already produces in substantial quantities, and which it could generate production surpluses of (relative to national demand) through significant and sustained improvement in yield.

The crucial third leg of the yield transformation value tripod is agronomy, specifically the entrenchment of good agronomic practices among local farmers.

The science that goes into developing the best crop genetics (seed) and nutrition (fertilizer) would not translate to desired yield transformation if local farmers remain bereft of how to adopt and use them. Recognition of this imperative has been the inspiration behind GAIL’s years-long value-chain interventions to empower farmers.

GAIL’s guiding philosophy is to work hand in hand with local farmers to build up the ecosystem of knowledge and knowledge dissemination in good agronomic practices that inform how farm-level productivity is engendered – from the application of inputs like seeds, fertilizer and crop protection, to the management of climatological conditions, to curbing post-harvest loss at the point of harvesting and first-line processing.

This bouquet of productivity-enhancing solutions is foundational to the endeavour of building resilience into the nation’s agricultural economy and food systems. They set the conditions for engendering sustainable food security conditions and paving the way for maximising possibilities in the country’s agro-industrial value corridor.