Introduction

In the 2010 PHC, specific questions are asked, for the first time, on households in farming activities, namely, crop farming, tree growing, livestock rearing and fish farming. The data collected consisted of types of crops cultivated, tree crops grown, farm size, type of cropping; livestock types, their numbers and keepers.

While there are a few large farms of cocoa and oil palm plantations, small scale agriculture is predominantly practiced in the District. Staple crops cultivated include cassava, cocoyam, plantain, yam and maize. Vegetables such as pepper, garden eggs, okro, tomatoes, and cabbage are also cultivated but on a smaller scale as compared to the staples and cash crops.

Free range animal rearing (mostly poultry, sheep and goats) is done on very small scale at the household level.

Households in Agriculture

The households in agriculture by type of activity and locality are shown in Table 7.1. In all there are 29,359 households of which 74.1 percent are identified as agricultural households.

Four types of agricultural activities are identified: crop farming, tree growing, livestock rearing and fish farming.

The urban/rural distribution revealed that about half of the total numbers of households are engaged in agriculture in the urban localities of the District, compared with three-quarters of the households in the rural localities.

Types of agriculture activities

Crop farming is the predominant agricultural activity in both the urban and rural localities whilst fish farming is less popular accounting for 0.1 percent.

In Figure 7.1, the distribution of agricultural households by type of activity and locality indicates that a higher proportion (99.1%) of those in the rural areas than the urban areas (96.5%) is into crop farming. Similarly, in the case of livestock rearing, a higher proportion of the households in the rural localities (16.9%) than the urban localities (7.6%) are into livestock rearing.

Table 7.2 presents results of the distribution of livestock and keepers in the District. The total animal population is 98,935 with 4,861 keepers, giving a crude average of 20 animals per keeper (in the case of bees, the number of hives were recorded). The bulk of the animals are chicken, which account for almost two-thirds (63.4%) of the total with 2,500 keepers. Sheep, goat, guinea fowl and fingerlings are the other types of livestock accounting for 14.8%, 10.1%, 3.1% and 2.3% of the total respectively. All other types of livestock including cattle are less than 2.0% of the total.