Meet The Young Entrepreneur Introducing Technological Skills To Animal Farming, Wisdom Mahami Is The Founder Of Crosslinksfarms

Agriculture, both crop and animal-rearing, has long been done with primitive methods – thereby affecting productivity and making it unattractive to the modern youth. But someone – Wisdom Mahami – is changing the narrative.

Crosslinksfarms, an agri-tech start-up making laudable progress by introducing technological skills to animal farming in the northern part of the country.

Wisdom Mahami from Nalerigu in the North East Region is the founder of Crosslinksfarms, the integrated livestock farm. He is a product of Navrongo Senior High School where he studied General Science, and Academic City College where he had his first degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

According to Wisdom, the idea behind Crosslinksfarms started as a project from the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Educational Project (STEMEP) Club back at Academic City, where they built egg-incubators from damaged refrigerators and other locally sourced materials under the guidance of lecturers, including Dr. Raymond Dumeh and Mr. Julian Bennet.

Wisdom together with several other STEMEP club members built the project initial version, which hatched chicks using the incubator.

Though others left the project for other things, Wisdom even after school took up the challenge and built an advanced version of the incubator that could house about 352 eggs, with funding and support from Dr. Mcbagonluri Fred. Since then, he has secured land in the Northern Region for the farm and assisted other farmers to increase productivity with the technology while employing other young folk.

“The business started in April 2019, and given the fact that I could build incubators to hatch eggs, I asked myself, why not start a poultry farm?”

How the idea was kept going

“As a first step, we decided to build up the industry by leveraging existing infrastructure, but also making sure to contribute our quota to said infrastructure. In that regard, we procured a 10-acre farm in Nalerigu to set up our farm facility, which currently has divisions for poultry, goats and sheep, and cattle. This farm currently has over 500 poultry birds (guinea-fowl and chickens), supplied from our hatchery with a 1,000-egg capacity incubator.

“This farm facility will be the primary place where we conduct research and develop alternative feed sources and best practices to increase the productivity of livestock and poultry birds. Ultimately, we will set up a meat-processing facility that will be supplied by farmers in our network – who will use our technology and technical expertise to produce quality, healthy meat products to feed the country,” he told Inspiring Start-ups.

Crosslinksfarms

Crosslinksfarms provides services which include: building and selling intelligent low-cost but highly efficient incubators based on customer requirements; construction of automatic temperature-controlled brooding systems; and providing technical guidance to local farms.

It is located in the Northern Region of Ghana and is mainly into guinea-fowl, local Ghana chicken, sheep and goat production.

“Our venture integrates all the aspects of production – from producing day-old chicks from our hatchery to producing cost-effective alternative poultry feed, and then technical support for farmers,” he said.

Source: Business & Financial Times

Email: elora.akpotosevbe@yahoo.com