Young Ghanaian farmer takes it slow

Ama Serwaa Ennin was looking forward to a nursing career at the end of her university training. Things didn't turn out the way she imagined. Today, she looks after some slow-moving individuals. But they're not people.

Sefakor Fekpe, bird story agency

Ama Serwaa Ennin squats in a greenhouse, proudly showing off her farm produce. What she's holding is a source of pride - and her future income. What she holds in her hands isn't the grain or legumes or even beans of the sort usually proffered up in tales of African farming success, however. Instead, she holds two snails - giant African snails, to be exact.

"One commentator asked me why I do this when my peers are leaving for Canada to practice nursing," the young farmer, who has documented her journey on social media, said.

The answer to the commentator is simple.

“They are the most profitable animals per square meter," explained Felix Appiah Nyarko, co-founder of Trisolace, an enterprise that helps smallholder farmers like Ennin grow snails organically in urban and rural areas.

Snails are a delicacy and source of protein for Ghanaians. Popular Ghanaian dishes like jollof rice with snails, banku with snail stew, yam chips with peppered snails, snail meat pies, and snail meat kebab can be found in eateries in most urban areas in the country. They've become a huge opportunity for farmers.

Over the last eight years, Nyarko has helped Trisolace establish more than 200 large greenhouses dedicated to growing snails across the country.

“The greenhouse package costs between 36,000 cedis (about US$3,000) to 200,000 cedis (about US$17,000) and the small boxes start from 700 cedis (about US$58) whereas a pack of snails is 150 cedis (about US$12.5),” Nyarko explained of the business.

Snail farming was about as far from Ennin's initial plans for a career as one could get. However, after qualifying for her dream job in nursing, she waited in vain to be placed in one of the country's medical centres.

“I realised that I wouldn’t be posted anytime soon after national service because our predecessors (were) still at home and I decided to do something and the opportunity I had here was land, so I started farming,” she said.

In 2022, Ennin's father told her about snail farming. Soon after, she travelled for training at the Trisolace Snail Farm in Accra, then started her project on her parents' land in Mampong Municipality in the Ashanti region.

“I market the snails online and buy from local pickers and sell to the open market while waiting for those in the greenhouse to fully mature,” she explained.

Ennin's parents helped her with the purchase of her first greenhouse, which cost her some GHC24,000 (US$2000). There, she grows vegetables like carrots, cabbage, lettuce, and cucumber. While she sells some of her harvest, most is used to feed around 1,700 edible giant African snails, or Lissachatina fulica.

“You need to have patience because it’s a long-term investment... Snail farming does not need much space. You can go through the training and start small, not necessarily the greenhouse method,” Ennin explained.

The idea of commercialized snail farming came to Trisolace's Nyarko during his job hunt when he met other friends and civil engineering colleagues who were also looking for jobs but were unsuccessful. Nyarko participated in different start-ups and entrepreneurship programmes and saw the huge potential the snail industry presents in terms of job creation.

"We started with small boxes filled with snails and gave them out to friends and colleagues where they reported on what they like and don’t like, as well as the mortality rates, so that was how we got our research,” Nyarko explained.

With savings from his national service allowance and support from his co-founder, they raised GHC5,000 to start rearing the snails on a commercial scale, using boxes.

“In 2018, we started on a larger scale doing the greenhouses. This was after I completed intensive training at a state-owned institution, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Forest Research Institute of Ghana (CSIR-FORIG) on snail farming technology.”

Their snail rearing was catching on and in 2019, Nyarko was awarded a US$5,000 grant by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National Youth Authority (NYA) under Ghana’s Youth Connekt Platform.

Trisolace has grown over the past seven years to now have 22 full-time staff, thanks in part to the application of different innovative methods, like using greenhouses and sprinklers.

“We saw that there were a lot of prospects in agriculture. But we didn’t have a place of our own. I was still with my parents so you couldn’t do anything like poultry or anything that smelled or made noise. That is when we started to research snails,” Nyarko explained.

Snail farming still has its challenges and risks, including a relatively high mortality rate during hatching if conditions are not closely monitored.

However, retired Ghanaian technician Elvis E. Nkrumah, who previously specialised in snail farming technology, advises young people to have patience and ensure best practices to become profitable over time.

“We advise that you don't sell your first-generation but the second-generation so that you have a sequence of ranges where you can sell the subsequent years and that will make them big enough to earn you higher prices so that you get a lot of profit. Your first generation will get you a lot of snail population. They lay a lot - on average, 400-500 eggs annually - and hatchability is between 95 to 100 per cent,” Nkrumah explained.

Another under-explored area in the value chain is the rising demand for snail slime by the cosmetic industry globally.

“A lot of people are developing interest in the sector not because of the flesh but because of the cosmetic industry. Few people in Ghana extract snail slime and export but a lot of them sell fresh meat. The Profitability is quite high, especially in the dry season when they're scarce," Nkrumah added.

"We can meet only 18 per cent of the total market demand, hence the reason we’re offering free training in order to get more people to invest in the sector," said Nyarko.

Ennin hopes to start selling off her snails in 2025.

bird story agency