Institute founder undergoes rice programme

The National Business

By MAZIE SELMBIA
GERTRUDE Andrias, leader and founder of the Kingku Hitech Training Institute, was among those who completed a two-week Trukai Smart Farmer training programme.
Andrias, from Kunjip in Jiwaka, has started training women and men in rice farming.
“I used to plant other food crops in the village until I saw the Trukai advertisement about the Smart Farmer programme,” she said.
Andrias, a teacher by profession, started her technical college among other businesses after graduating from the University of Goroka.
She received an Australian aid scholarship to study Business in Agriculture at the Queensland University.
Andrias taught at her college, offering business studies, technical courses, agri-business courses and upper secondary education to school-leavers.
“After the two-week training, I went back and started doing things like how Trukai trained us to do,” Andrias said.
Of the 2kg of rice seeds given to us by Trukai, I harvested close to 400kg of rice.
“I have trained 46 persons on how to grow rice using the irrigation method,” Andrias said.
Of the 46, 22 are women farmers.
Also she has sent four of her farmers again to the third batch
Andrias attended the training in December 2022 as the first batch of farmers and started growing rice in January of 2023. She harvested the rice after four months. “Once I went back to my village I told women who only planted sweet potato that they can integrated rice into their sweet potato farming,” Andrias said.
She said she told them that the drain they dug in their sweet potato plots could be used to plant rice.
Andrias also educated women on commercialising food crops such as sweet potato by calculating how much to grow and how much estimated to be harvested.
The 26 farmers in Jiwaka have planted five hectares of rice.
“The issue that we are facing is storage, we can harvest rice, but where will we put it? I am trying to talk with Unitech and Trukai to support us, by providing another training on harvesting, packaging and storing rice,” Andrias said.