The Rain Has Changed. Now Farmers Must Change With It.

Ask any farmer in Adamawa State’s northern local government areas what has changed in the past decade and the answer comes quickly: the rain. Not that it has stopped entirely though drought years have become more frequent but that it has become unpredictable in ways that have broken the farming calendars that sustained families for generations.

Rain arrives weeks later than expected, departs weeks earlier, and when it does fall, it sometimes comes all at once in violent downpours that run off hardened soil rather than soaking in. For a smallholder farmer planning a planting season around the rhythms of a landscape they have read since childhood, this is not a weather inconvenience. It is an existential threat.

The evidence is not only anecdotal. Nigeria’s meteorological agency, NiMet, has documented consistent changes in rainfall onset and cessation across northern Nigeria over the past three decades. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) data shows that in climate-stressed communities, agricultural output has fallen by up to 40 percent over the past decade. The World Food Programme projected that 33.1 million Nigerians would face acute food insecurity during the 2025 lean season, a figure driven by the intersection of climate change, rising input costs, and policy failure. Nowhere is that intersection more visible than in the farming communities of Adamawa.

To understand how these changes are affecting farmers on the ground and what response is actually reaching them. The Gazette spoke with the founder of the Environmental Care Foundation and Principal Special Assistant to the Governor of Adamawa State on CSO and NGO Coordination. With decades of experience in the development sector and direct engagement with farming communities across the state, his assessment of what climate change is doing to Nigeria’s agricultural communities is clear, candid, and carries the weight of someone who has watched the problem build and watched the government response fall short.

The First Thing a Farmer Notices: The Crop Year Is Broken

Climate change in the context of farming communities is not about global averages or atmospheric carbon concentrations. It is about the crop year, the sequence of rain, planting, growth, harvest, and storage that determines whether a family eats. And the crop year in Adamawa, as across northern Nigeria, is increasingly broken.

The most immediate and widely felt impact is the disruption of rainfall timing. When rain arrives early weeks before the expected planting window, farmers who follow their traditional calendar find their seedlings caught in a premature growing phase that the soil and subsequent rains cannot sustain.

When rain arrives late, the planting season is compressed, farmers rush to get seeds in the ground, but the shortened growing window means crops reach maturity before they should, cutting yields. When drought sets in mid-season as Adamawa experienced in a stretch lasting nearly 30 to 40 consecutive dry days in one recent season, crops already in the ground can die entirely before the rains return.

“The most noticeable change is the drop in agricultural yield and the shift in rainfall patterns. The farmer is not getting the crops they expected, because the rain no longer comes when it should.”

This timing disruption has a cascading effect. A farmer who planned to plant in the second week of May and saw no rain until mid-June has already lost a month of growing season. That compressed season means the crop must mature faster than it was bred to which in most traditional varieties, it cannot. The result is a harvest smaller than the land and the labour investment should have produced. Year after year of compressed seasons, each slightly worse than the last, is what a slow-moving agricultural crisis looks like from inside a farming community.

Compounding the rainfall problem is the emergence of insect pests not previously common to the region. Changing temperature and humidity conditions have expanded the range and breeding cycles of several crop pests, some of which Adamawa’s farmers are encountering for the first time. These insects strike during the cultivation phase, attacking crops while they are still growing, and again at the storage phase, where grain that a farmer has successfully harvested and stored can lose a significant portion of its weight and nutritional value within months.

A farmer who managed to bring in 10 kilograms of grain during a difficult rain year may find, six months later, that insect damage has reduced that to six or seven. The harvest that should have bridged the lean season does not.

Adamawa’s Agricultural Strength and What Climate Is Putting at Risk

Understanding what climate change threatens in Adamawa requires understanding what the state produces and why it matters. Adamawa is one of Nigeria’s significant agricultural states, with a comparative advantage in a set of crops that are foundational to food security across the northeast and beyond.

The state is among the top producers of maize nationally ranking fifth in Nigeria, behind Kaduna, Niger, Taraba, and Plateau. It is a significant producer of guinea corn (sorghum), groundnut, cowpea, and beans, and also produces yam, millet, cassava, sesame, and sugarcane.

These are not export curiosities. Maize is the primary staple grain for millions of Nigerians and the main feedstock for the poultry and livestock industry. Guinea corn is the backbone of local brewing, animal feed, and household nutrition across the northeast. Groundnut sustains cooking oil production and direct consumption. Cowpea is one of Nigeria’s most important protein sources for low-income households. The agriculture of Adamawa feeds not only the state but contributes to supply chains reaching Abuja, Lagos, and beyond.

Climate change is directly degrading this production base. Maize requires a minimum number of consistent wet days to complete its growth cycle and the shorter, more erratic rainy season is denying it those days in more and more farming communities. Guinea corn, which is more drought tolerant, is under pressure from the increased frequency and duration of mid-season dry spells.

Groundnut, which requires well drained sandy loam soils and consistent but not excessive moisture, is being hit by both drought-induced stress and the unpredictable intense downpours that saturate soils and promote fungal infection. The state’s agricultural comparative advantage, built over generations, is being steadily eroded by a climate system that is no longer operating on the schedule those crops were selected for.

“Adamawa is known for maize, guinea corn, groundnut, cowpea, beans. These are what we do well. These are what the government should be building on. But if the rain does not come when it should, none of that comparative advantage matters.”

The Government Response: Announced, But Not Delivered

The Nigerian government has not been silent on the challenge of supporting small holder farmers. Successive administrations have launched programmes, announced budgets, and committed resources to agricultural development. The most prominent of these in recent years was the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP), launched in 2015 under then-President Muhammadu Buhari to provide smallholder farmers with loans in cash and kind like seeds, fertiliser, and equipment linked to specific commodity value chains.

The CBN reported disbursing N1.09 trillion under the programme, reaching more than four million farmers across 21 agricultural commodities nationwide. In parts of the north, the ABP expanded rice production and gave some farmers access to inputs they had never been able to afford independently.
But the programme’s track record, scrutinised honestly, tells a more complicated story.

Research from multiple Nigerian universities and independent analysts found that the ABP’s benefits did not significantly reach the most marginalised small holder farmers in many states. The N518 billion loan default recorded under the programme pointed not just to farmers failing to repay, but to a disbursement process that routed funds through intermediaries, was plagued by beneficiary list manipulation, and in documented cases sent money to people with no farming activity at all.

The CBN itself acknowledged the programme faced challenges of poor targeting, weak monitoring, and limited due diligence.

“The government says it has spent three billion, ten billion, one trillion naira on agriculture. But the real farmers, the people in the fields are not seeing it. If the money was going to the right people, we would see food everywhere. We see the opposite.”

The Anchor Borrowers’ Programme was suspended in 2023 when incoming CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso signalled a return to orthodox monetary policy, stepping back from the direct development finance interventions of his predecessors. No credible successor programme was immediately instituted by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. Farmers who had come to depend on seasonal ABP support found themselves without it at precisely the moment when fuel subsidy removal had pushed the cost of every agricultural input, diesel for boreholes, transport for produce, fertiliser to new highs. The gap left by the programme’s suspension has not been filled.

The government’s strategic grain reserve system presents a parallel story of infrastructure that exists on paper but underperforms in practice. Nigeria has 33 grain silos distributed across the country, including one in Adamawa State, with a combined designed storage capacity of 1.3 million metric tonnes. These silos were constructed between 2009 and 2010 at an estimated cost of $11.85 billion, specifically to stabilise food prices, provide emergency grain relief, and guarantee a minimum price floor for farmers during surplus seasons. The logic was sound. The execution has been chronically weak.

A survey by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) found that the operational capacity of Nigeria’s silo network is less than 22 percent of its designed capacity. Sources at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture have acknowledged that Nigeria has never filled its strategic grain reserve to even 500,000 metric tonnes.

In November 2024, the government released 42,000 metric tonnes of grain to address rising food prices, a quantity that agricultural economists noted was insufficient to move the market in a country of 220 million people.

The implication is straightforward. A government that announced it was holding grain reserves for emergencies was, when the emergency arrived, holding very little. Farmers who planted, harvested, and sold their grain expecting a price floor guaranteed by government procurement found, instead, a market driven entirely by trader and merchant speculation. In 2021, traders and merchants controlled 99.6 percent of Nigeria’s total grain supply. The government controlled 0.4 percent. Any claim that Nigeria has a functional food security buffer must be measured against those numbers.

The NGO Gap: Who Is Actually Reaching Farmers

In the absence of consistently functional government delivery, civil society organisations and NGOs have become de facto intermediaries between policy and people in Adamawa’s farming communities. This is not a new observation, but it is one that the government’s own programme architects have consistently failed to act on.

Across the administrations that designed and implemented the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture’s various intervention schemes, and the state level agricultural support programmes, a structural exclusion of civil society from implementation has been standard practice.

Government designs the programme. Government announces the programme. Government claims the budget. And the gap between what is announced and what farmers receive is filled if at all by NGOs working with resources that are a fraction of the government’s stated commitments.

The case for NGO integration into agricultural programme delivery is not ideological. It is empirical. Research consistently shows that in Nigeria, community trust in NGO representatives is significantly higher than trust in government officials, particularly for financial benefit distribution. Where government officials distributing inputs are seen based on documented experience as likely to redirect resources to political supporters, NGOs operating within the same community are perceived as more accountable. This trust asymmetry matters enormously when you are trying to get seeds, fertiliser, or loan disbursements to the actual farmers rather than to the politically connected individuals whose names appear on beneficiary lists.

“In Nigeria, most citizens do not believe the government will give things fairly. But they believe the NGO. If the government goes to share something, people say it will go to their own people. If the NGO goes to share, people want to see. This is the trust we have built, and the government has not found a way to use it.”

The proposed reform is specific. Rather than expecting NGOs to design and fund their own parallel programmes, the government should build NGO and civil society representation into the implementation architecture of its own programmes from the outset. Under a functioning Anchor Borrowers’ Programme or any successor scheme, for instance, NGO partners at state level should be responsible for farmer identification, selection, and qualification functions currently performed by government officials whose incentives to maintain list integrity are weak.

Government retains programme design, budget, and oversight. Civil society provides the community interface that ensures resources reach the people they were designed to reach. Neither replaces the other. Both are necessary.
Adamawa, specifically, has demonstrated that this model can work. The state has a more developed NGO and civil society ecosystem than many northeastern states, partly as a consequence of the humanitarian response to the Boko Haram insurgency that brought multiple international and local organisations into the state.

The networks built during that humanitarian response, the community relationships, the local staff with verified access to farming communities across all 21 LGAs represent assets that any serious agricultural adaptation programme should be drawing on. That they are not being systematically integrated into the government’s food security response is a policy failure with direct consequences for the farmers who are not being reached.

What Adaptation Actually Looks Like
Beyond the institutional failures, farmers in Adamawa are adapting, not because of government programmes, but in spite of the absence of them. The most widespread adaptation is calendar adjustment: farmers observing, year by year, how the rain is shifting and moving their planting date accordingly, accepting a compressed season rather than planting on schedule for a rain that does not arrive. This is rational and partially effective, but it has limits. A shortened growing season is a reduced harvest, regardless of how well a farmer manages it.

Variety switching is the most technically promising adaptation, and the one most dependent on support systems that are inconsistently available. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) have developed drought-tolerant and early maturing varieties of maize, cowpea, sorghum, and groundnut specifically for conditions like those Adamawa’s farmers now face.

Short cycle maize varieties can complete their growth in 90 days rather than 120, fitting inside a compressed rainy season. Drought-tolerant cowpea varieties maintain productivity in moisture conditions that would destroy traditional cultivars. These are not theoretical tools. They are available. What is not consistently available is the seed supply chain, the extension service capacity, and the financing that would allow the majority of Adamawa’s small holder farmers to access and adopt them.

Agroforestry, the deliberate integration of trees into farming systems is a third adaptation pathway with particular relevance for Adamawa. Trees on farmland moderate microclimate, reduce soil evaporation, improve water retention, and over time rebuild the organic matter that degraded soils have lost.

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), in which farmers protect and manage trees that regenerate naturally on their land rather than clearing them, has produced documented yield improvements in drought-stressed farming systems across Niger, Burkina Faso, and parts of northern Nigeria. The technique costs almost nothing and can be adopted without external input. What it requires is that farmers understand why keeping trees on their land is agronomically beneficial rather than simply reducing their cultivable area. That is an extension and education function.

“Government should use comparative advantage. Adamawa is good at maize, guinea corn, groundnut, cowpea. Support farmers to do what they already know. Then add what they need to do better, the right seeds, the right training, the right market. Do not make them start from zero.”

The Path Forward: Sincerity, Systems, and Scale

What emerges from the account of anyone working closely with Adamawa’s farming communities is that the problem is not a lack of knowledge about what to do. Nigeria has agricultural research institutions that produce excellent adaptation tools. It has meteorological infrastructure that generates seasonal forecasts. It has civil society organisations with genuine community reach. It has silo infrastructure designed for food security. And it has, on paper, spent trillions of naira on agricultural support programmes. What it has not managed to assemble is a system in which all of these elements work together, consistently, in service of the farmers who need them.

The specific reforms identified by those working in the space are straightforward in principle, if politically difficult in practice. Government agricultural programmes like credit, input subsidy, price support, must be built around verified, real farmers, not politically assembled beneficiary lists. The Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, or any successor initiative, should be institutionalised under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture rather than operated as a central bank development finance instrument subject to monetary policy reversal.

Nigeria’s 33 grain silos should be brought to operational capacity, a stated commitment that the government has not delivered and the strategic grain reserve should be used as its designers intended to stabilise prices for consumers and guarantee a floor price for farmers, rather than sitting empty while traders control the market.

Civil society organisations should be formally embedded in programme implementation, not as recipients of sub-grants to run parallel activities, but as verified delivery partners responsible for the community interface that government officials have consistently been unable to credibly provide. And state governments should be given the authority and budget to implement what are, ultimately, local agricultural programmes. A federal scheme administered from Abuja, without state-level identification, selection, and oversight, will continue to lose money to the distance between where it is designed and where it is supposed to land.

The urgency of all of this is not abstract. Nigeria’s food inflation in 2024 reached nearly 40 percent. Thirty-three million Nigerians face food insecurity in 2025. And the climate pressures driving those numbers, the shorter rainy seasons, the mid-season droughts, the more intense and unpredictable rainfall events are not going to reverse. Every year that passes without a serious, functional agricultural adaptation programme in place is a year in which Adamawa’s farmers absorb a crisis that better governance could have significantly reduced.

What the Farmer Is Left With

The farmer in Madagali who plants two weeks later than her mother did, because the rain that used to come in May now comes in June, she has adapted. The farmer in Mubi North who switched from his traditional maize variety to a shorter-cycle cultivar because three years of harvest loss taught him he had no choice, he has adapted. The farmer who stores grain under his bed and checks it every week for insects, because he cannot afford to lose what little the season gave him, she has adapted. These adaptations are real, practical, and often ingenious. But they are the adaptations of people working alone, without support, against a problem that is larger than any individual farm.

The question that climate change poses to Nigerian agriculture is not whether farmers can adapt. They are already doing it. The question is whether the government will adapt alongside them with programmes that actually reach the fields, institutions that function as designed, and a sincerity of purpose that measures success by what changes in farming communities rather than by what is announced in budget speeches.

The rain has changed. Whether the response to that change is adequate is a choice, not a condition of nature.