Introduction

Agriculture is a key sector that can drive the ambition of the government to effectively reduce poverty in Ghana and help the country to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Ghana. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has noted that despite the importance of agriculture, it is arguably the least known sector of many economies in terms of hard facts and statistics (FAO, 2012). Any strategy for reducing poverty and food insecurity must be based on timely and accurate information that measure the impact of agricultural policies and programmes.

In the past, one of the major difficulties encountered during the assessment of contributions of men and women to agricultural development was the non-availability of gender-disaggregated data with respect to the roles of women and men in agriculture production. The 2010 PHC for the first time administered questionnaires for households in agriculture. This chapter briefly discusses the households engaged in agricultural activities and the type of activities, which include crop farming, tree growing, livestock rearing and fish farming.

Households in Agriculture

The major agricultural activities captured in the 2010 Census are crop farming, tree planting, livestock rearing and fish farming. The table shows that agricultural activities are more dominant in the rural areas (71.5%) than the urban areas. Crop faming is the most important agricultural activity (10,655 households) for 26.7 percent of agricultural households in the urban areas and 73.3 percent in the rural areas.

Livestock Farming which is the second most practiced agricultural activity has 20.9 percent and 79.1 percent of the agricultural households in the urban and rural areas respectively undertaking this activity. Fish farming has the lowest proportion of households engaged in agriculture with 14.3 percent in the urban areas and 85.7 percent in the rural areas.

Types of Farming Activities

Figure 7.1 presents distribution of households in agriculture. The table shows that the
highest proportion (75.8%) of households in the district are engaged in crop farming
followed by livestock rearing (23.6%) with only 0.6 percent engaged in tree planting
activities. Fish farming is rarely practiced in the District.

Types of livestock, other animals reared and keepers

Table 7.1 shows the distribution of livestock and keepers in Awutu Senya District. There are a total of 80,654 livestock reared by 4,700 keepers with an average of 17 animals per keeper. Chicken is the most popular animal kept (50,392) followed by goats (17,494) and sheep (4,116). Other animals include cattle, ducks and grass cutters. Chicken again has the highest number of keepers (2,427) followed by goats (1,552) and sheep (366). The highest average animal per keeper is snail (73 per keeper) followed by glasscutter (42 per keeper), ostrich (33 per keeper), cattle (24 per keeper) and chicken (21 per keeper).