MOFA urged to encourage more women into Grasscutter Project

Professor Boniface B. Kayang, Head of Department of Animal Science, University of Ghana, has tasked the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to encourage more women to embrace and actively participate in the Ghana Grasscutter Project.

He said even though the project might not serve as an end to women household and other challenges, it had the potentials to help address the nutritional and protein deficiency levels within households.

“Women as managers of the family, their involvement in the project would not only help to promote income generation levels and livelihoods but also enhance growth and development of the household,” he said.

Professor Kayang made the appeal at the Ghana Grasscutter Project Training Workshop organised for 25 key beneficiary farmers of the project in Upper West Region held in Wa.

The Project is aimed to support farmers in the region to rear grasscutters to supplement family income, improve protein intake and promote environmental and wildlife conservation.

The workshop was on the theme: “Grasscutter production, processing and assessment of value-added products”, and the participants were taken through the feeding, reproduction, health management and handling.

Professor Kayang urged the Women in Agriculture Unit in the region to embark on mobilisation and registration drive of women in the communities to benefit from the project to supplement their incomes.

He advised beneficiary grass cutter farmers to cultivate moringa to add vitamins and minerals to the food of grass cutters and also humans, while appealing to them to take good care of the grass cutters to also take good care of them.

Professor Miho Murayama, Wildlife Research Centre at Kyoto University in Japan, who was at the workshop, said the purpose of the second phase of the project launched in 2021 was to add value to locally produced animal source protein for improvement in human household nutrition in Ghana.

Professor Murayama, who is also the Director of the Grasscutter Initiative for Rural Transformation (GIFT), said the establishment of a production and processing system to support stable supply and improvement of nutritional knowledge, especially education on nutritional balance at home and elementary schools and the support of grasscutter breeding were some of the goals that the project sought to achieve.

Dr Christopher Adenyo, a Senior Research Fellow at the Livestock and Poultry Research Centre (LIPRE), University of Ghana, said grasscutter domestication started in the 1970s by the Game and Wildlife Department to help reduce the impact of hunting, make its meat readily available and to reduce the risk of zoonotic infections in Ghana.

He encouraged people in the region to take advantage of the grasscutter project to produce more grasscutters for domestic consumption and for export to earn foreign exchange for the country.

“The grasscutter requires less space for keeping, eats mainly grass, which can be obtained cheaply and no competition for food with man,” he pointed out.

Dr Adenyo, therefore, appealed to government workers to use their backyards for grasscutter production to supplement their incomes and improve household protein.

The Senior Research Fellow urged the farmers to establish pasture, and feed them with adequate grass, pito mash and dawadawa pulp as supplement, while storing groundnuts, Bambara beans, soyabeans Leaves, millet stocks and corncobs for feeding.

He, however, cautioned the farmers against feeding their grasscutters with lots of grains from maize, millet and sorghum while avoiding feeding them with fresh cassava and yam peels.

“Dry fresh cassava and yam peels before using them to feed the grasscutter and also avoid feeding them with mouldy feeds,” he advised.

On reproductive management, Dr Adenyo advised the farmers to cross mature males and females at seven to eight months old and wean litter at eight weeks minimum.

Farmers should also separate males and females before sexual maturity at least during six months period and do not allow the female to litter in the presence of the male.

Dr Adenyo urged the farmers to show concern for record keeping, especially date of crossing, date of littering, number of kids born and date of weaning and mortality of their grasscutters.

The Project had been in operation in the Upper West Region since 2014 through a collaborative effort between the University of Ghana and Kyoto University, Japan, with initial support from JICA and subsequently from Ajinomoto Foundation, Japan.

The collaboration was later extended to include the University of Edinburgh, UK, with support from Innovate UK.
The farmers discussed their successes and failures and lessons learnt.

Some of the ways the project benefit successful farmers are provision of protein for the family, generation of income for the payment of school fees, purchase of foodstuff and payment of other bills.

The farmers appealed to the Ghana Grasscutter Project to consider providing them with gloves, wellington boots to protect themselves against reptiles and tricycles to facilitate the transportation of feeds, especially during the dry seasons.

Different processed grassccutter meat products were made including minced canned grasscutter meat, chunk canned grasscutter meat and vacuum packed grasscutter meat, which served to the farmers to have a taste of them and give recommendations.