Gradually, harvest season has commenced for rainy season farming, and farmers are either harvesting or preparing to harvest their produce. Sadly, in Nigeria about 50% of post harvest losses are recorded annually (especially for fruits and vegetables). Therefore, it is important that good post-harvesting practices are being adopted to reduce post harvest losses. This is because post harvest loss is a major threat to food security in many developing countries as farmers lose a major portion of their produce, affecting their livelihood also. It is connected to poor harvesting practices, lack of storage facilities and an unstructured market.
For post harvest practices, farmers need to adopt best practices during harvest by ensuring that produce is harvested at the appropriate moisture content, cooling off when necessary to reduce field temperature for specified produce, ensuring drying at the appropriate temperature, achieving the safe level of moisture content and adopting good warehouse practices amongst others. It is essential that farmers are equipped with the appropriate information to handle post harvest activities in order to reduce losses and improve productivity.
Population is increasing, and food production should match such an increase. However, we need to salvage the losses currently incurred as a result of post harvest losses in order to increase our production capacity and improve the farmers' livelihood. Sadly, if post harvest losses were a country, she would feed her whole nation and have surplus. Therefore, we need to improve farmers' knowledge to minimize the losses and put us on the path of food security and shared prosperity. Food is our common language and everyone should have the right to access enough food at any given time.