Introduction

The 2010 PHC collected for the first time data on agricultural activity in Ghana (PHC 2010 analytical report). The Prestea Huni-Valley which is regarded as an agrarian District with more than half of the population engaged in agricultural activities. This chapter discusses households in agriculture by size of household and type of locality as well as the various types of farming.

 Households in Agriculture

The 2010 PHC defines an agricultural household as one in which at least one person in the household is engaged in any type of farming activity, namely crop farming, tree growing, livestock rearing and fish farming. Households engaged in agriculture account for 52.0 percent of the total number of households in the District. Table 7.1 shows the number of households in agricultural activities and locality.

There is a wide variation among localities in the proportions engaged in Agricultural activity. Whilst in the rural localities 68.2 percent of households are engaged in agricultural activities, only 26.2 percent of households in the urban communities are into agriculture.

Type of Farming Activities

The four types of farming considered under the 2010 PHC are crop, tree, livestock and fish farming. From table 7.1, over nine in ten households (97.3%) are engaged in crop farming and 28.1 percent in livestock rearing. Fish farming and tree planting are relatively low in the District with proportions below 0.9% and 0.3% respectively. The locality variation in respect of the type of farming activity is clear in the census data. As expected the proportion of households engaged in crop farming is higher in the rural localities (97.9%) than in the urban localities (94.6%). Although tree planting is rare in the District, it is mostly done by urban dwellers (0.6%).

Types of Livestock, Numbers and Keepers

Generally, out of 171,701 livestock reared in Prestea Huni-Valley, the common ones are Chicken (66.3%), goat (12.2%) and fish farming (9.3%). Table 7.2 depicts the distribution of livestock’s and keepers. There are 8,021 livestock keepers in the District and the average animal per keeper is 21. There are 16,016 fishes with 85 keepers in the District with the average being 188. There are 19 farmers who rear 370 ostriches in the District and each farmer keeps an average of 19 ostriches.