In a letter dated 12April 1949, the Department of Agriculture requested that the District Commissioner hand over a vegetable garden in Choggu to an ex-service man Mr E. N. A.Boatey. This transfer was meant to facilitate the payment of rents for the land to the appropriate quarters . This shows that the local people also practiced dry season vegetable, but not on a large scale, compared to rain-fed vegetable agriculture which is a predominant practice because of the climatic condition in this agro-ecological zone.In the livestock domain, cattle, sheep, goat, horses, donkeys, pigs and poultry of various types were kept by the Dagomba’s. There were no intensive productions systems of animal rearing in the region, and small stocks were allowed to forage freely in the dry season and confined in the wet season .
Technological changes started in this sector with the importation of cattle from Europe with most of them dying before reaching the Gold Coast or shortly afterward. The few that survived were cross breed with the local cattle to produce what referred to as half or quartered-bred European crosses, and they were placed in the chief’s herds. This practice of passing down new technology to the community through the chiefs as already explained above was a popular concept then and sometimes still applied today in rural agricultural projects .Later local selective stock breeding was encouraged, nft growing system where Zebu, Mossi, and Ndama cattle were imported from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger for cross breeding with the West African shorthorn cattle found in the protectorate . This new breed of livestock from the French African colonies was given to chiefs of the Dagomba catchment area. Native authority kraals were thus created to increase the cattle population in the region, as old and dysfunctional bulls were replaced with new active bulls.
There existed few cattle-owning families who were not capitalist-oriented. Thus the objective of increasing cattle population for commercial purposes by the colonial administrators did not succeed .From the pre-colonial to the colonial period Shaffer argued that “by most accounts, agricultural practices in the 1930s were essentially unchanged from earlier times. The staple crops remained millet and guinea corn which were cultivated using the same techniques as in the earliest times”. This is corroborated with an observation made by an agricultural officer Lynn, C. W, who describes agricultural activity thus, “men wander over the farm with long sticks and make holes at random, and women and children follow with the seeds in a calabash…the precarious food situation was due primarily to…methods not sufficiently intensive for the conditions obtaining” . The quotation above reflects the contemporary agricultural practice of the Dagomba people, from my observation during fieldwork and even discussions with other colleagues who have interacted with farmers in peri-urban and rural areas.
The slight difference is that few farmers now use tractors in their fields.relates Gunder-Frank’s metro pole-satellite framework on Latin America, to the case of the Northern territories and the Gold Coast in Ghana. Gunder-Frank’s framework in Figure 3 stated that metropolises were not only centers of confluence but exploitation, and he related this to the socio-economic and political relationship between the third world countries and the capitalist economies. The capitalist economies are meant to stay developed at the expense of the underdeveloped countries. Suttonuses the center-periphery relationship of Gunder-Frank to explain the relationship between the then Northern territories and the Gold Coast as designed by the British. stated that the North was a labour reserve for the South and its administration left at the mercy of the development in the South. This idea of the Northbeing a labour reserve for industries and plantations in the South is supported by many authors like.also supports this idea when he stated that the work for food programme and the use of compulsory labour retarded development in the North in favour of the South. Also, cheap food and reasonable prices for labour rendered in the South also encouraged North-South migration in the Gold Coast colony.