Ndalatando – Two thousand tons of soybeans began to be harvested Sunday, at Fazenda Samba Lucala, in the municipality of Samba Caju, province of Cuanza-Norte, in an area of 140 hectares, corresponding to the first harvest of the 2023/2024 agricultural year.
The information was provided to the press by the director of operations at Agricultiva, the company responsible for the technological operation of the project, under the management of the Ministry of Defense, since February this year, Barack Gouver.
He added that the planting, carried out in September, also covers 200 hectares of corn, the harvest outlook for which has not been revealed.
According to the technician, for the second season, whose seeds were sown in February this year, 550 hectares of corn and 120 soybeans were planted, with the harvest scheduled between June and July this year.
The Samba Lucala Farm produced, in the 2022/2023 agricultural season, 14 thousand tons of cereals, 9,498 tons of corn and 4,637 tons of soybeans, cultivated on a total of 2,554 hectares.
On the occasion, the governor of Cuanza-Norte, João Diogo Gaspar, who witnessed the beginning of the harvest, highlighted the involvement of the Samba Lucala Farm in cereal production, as an important commitment to guaranteeing family food security.
He added that the aforementioned harvest demonstrates that the country can produce, to guarantee the reduction of imports and food self-sufficiency.
“The only way to combat hunger and poverty is to focus on large-scale production,” he said.
He argued that producers should continue to be encouraged to increase production levels.
He highlighted, on the other hand, that large-scale production is intrinsically linked to road improvements to allow, on the one hand, agricultural inputs to be taken to the fields and, on the other, the flow of production.
He reiterated the Government's commitment to improving roads, as well as the local government's openness to internal and external investment to boost production in the region.
The enterprise, created with public capital, in an investment from the Angolan Government of USD 54.6 million (one dollar is worth Kz 832, 633), has a production capacity of 30 thousand tons/year of soybeans, beans and corn.
The project is implemented in an area of 11 thousand hectares. Of this, the farm currently operates two thousand hectares, of which one thousand and three hundred are irrigated and 700 are rainfed.
The farm has an irrigation system ensured by 23 pivots, a water containment dam of 450 cubic meters and 18 meters deep, a flooded area of 516 thousand cubic meters, a pumping station of 2,800 cubic meters/hour and 33 kilometers of PVC piping.
It is a project by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that began to be implemented in 2016, which has so far allowed the creation of 60 direct and 100 indirect jobs. DS/AC/DOJ
