**9. Average farmer yields of some selected cereal crops Ghana**

The average cereal yields of farmers in Ghana are very low. There may be many causes to the low crop yields obtained by farmers in Ghana. These include the use of local crop variet‐ ies which are low yielding; poor management of the crop on the field (late weed removal, inadequate plant population, late harvesting) but paramount among these is low soil fertili‐ ty. This is because the same variety used by farmers without adequate supply of plant nu‐ trients have been found to yield lower than the same variety properly managed by research scientists including the provision of adequate quantities of nutrients especially nitrogen.

Table 10 shows some of the average yields of cereal crops by farmers in Ghana as against the yields obtained from properly managed fields with adequate supply of nutrients which leaves a very large yield gap of more than 40 %. Among the crops, sorghum has the largest yield gap of about 60 % with millet recording the lowest of about 30 %. Farmers in northern Ghana are of the view that sorghum does not require fertilizer for high yields and therefore do not apply fertilizer to the sorghum crop. On the other hand, the millet available are most‐ ly local varieties and do not respond to fertilizer. With the application of fertilizers and ade‐ quate management of the millet crop, the increase in yield was just 0. 5 tons/ha compared to the rest of the crops which had increases in yield of more than 1 ton/ha.


**Table 10.** National average yields (tons/ha) of some selected cereal crops in Ghana
