Introduction 

Ghana’s economy is regarded as agrarian largely due to the sector’s contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), labour absorption and foreign exchange earnings. The contribution of agriculture to foreign exchange earnings averaged 45 percent in the 1990s but dropped to 40 percent in the 2000s (ISSER, 2011). The sector’s contribution to GDP also declined from over 40 percent in the 1990s to 30 percent in the 2000s (ISSER, 2011).

The objective of this chapter is to find out how many households engaged in agricultural activities and the type of agricultural activities they are involved in. For the purpose of this census, an agricultural household was defined as one with at least one person in the household engaged in any type of farming activity, namely crop farming, tree growing, livestock rearing and fish farming (GSS, 2012). 7.2 Agricultural households Table 7.1 looks at households engaged in agricultural activities and their type of locality. Inferring from the table, it could be observed that 8,143 households were engaged in agriculture, out of which 6.9 percent were within the urban setting, while a chunk of them (93.1%) were found within the rural settings.

This variation could better be explained using the supply of agricultural land and sector employment. The supply of agricultural land in the rural areas is naturally always relatively greater than the supply in urban areas. From the various agricultural activities, majority of the rural dwellers were found within households that engaged in agriculture (93.1 percent) while only 6.9 percent of the urban dwellers were employed in the agriculture sector.

For crop farming, 6.7 percent of the urban households engaged in it while 93.3 percent of the rural households were crop farmers. Fewer households were engaged in tree planting in urban areas (4.8 percent) as compared to the rural areas (95.2 percent). Fish farming was the least patronized agricultural activity with no one engaged in it in both urban and rural areas in the district. This is possibly due to limited and less developed water bodies in the district to facilitate full time fish farming.

Types of Farming Activities

 
Data on types of agricultural activities in the district is presented in Table 7.1 above. Four types of agricultural activities could be identified: crop farming (98.7 percent), tree planting (0.3 percent) and livestock rearing (54.8 percent). The Agricultural activity that was commonly practiced was mainly crop farming and livestock rearing. The rural areas accounted for 93.1 percent of the agricultural households (Table 7.1). The high proportion of agricultural households in rural areas is basically due to the fact that agriculture is essentially a rural activity.

Type of livestock numbers and keepers

Livestock rearing is the second most important agricultural activity in the savannah agroecological zone. Table 7.2 shows the types of livestock reared in the district and their numbers. The three main types of ruminants reared were cattle (37,573), goats (36, 285) and sheep (32,001). In the bird category, there were 59,020 chickens, 16,225 guinea fowls, about 1,585 ducks and 1,161 doves. Other livestock (non-traditional livestock), kept included grasscutters (671) and rabbits (27).