What Nigerian farmers actually talk about
Every public thread in the agriculture section of Nairaland, Nigeria's largest web forum, read end to end and coded against a vocabulary fixed in advance. This is a record of what people raised themselves — nobody was asked a question, so nobody was prompted into an answer.
Read the findings → · How a post becomes data →
What kind of content this is
| page type | pages | |
|---|---|---|
| promo_listing | 5001 | |
| discussion_qa | 1828 | |
| news_repost | 637 | |
| farm_diary | 339 | |
| buyer_request | 173 | |
| training_offer | 147 | |
| off_topic | 118 | |
| directory_thread | 101 | |
| scam_alert | 79 | |
| price_list | 41 | |
| mixed | 15 |
Advertising is classified, not discarded — a promo corpus is itself a record of what is sold, at what price, by whom, and it is where nearly all the price data comes from. But it means findings about discussion rest on the discussion pages, not on all 8479.
When this was written
| year | pages | |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 1 | |
| 2011 | 4 | |
| 2012 | 6 | |
| 2013 | 15 | |
| 2014 | 60 | |
| 2015 | 152 | |
| 2016 | 137 | |
| 2017 | 193 | |
| 2018 | 199 | |
| 2019 | 253 | |
| 2020 | 327 | |
| 2021 | 363 | |
| 2022 | 365 | |
| 2023 | 415 | |
| 2024 | 1260 | |
| 2025 | 2734 | |
| 2026 | 1995 |
Weighted towards recent years by design: the crawl took a recent window plus a backfill of older high-engagement threads. Thin early years are a sampling decision, not a decline in activity.
The findings
Farmers do try to organise -- and then leave for WhatsApp to do it. What the forum can and cannot host.
What is actually hurting people, ranked three ways, with the post behind every claim.
What things cost, by commodity and period -- never averaged across a currency collapse.
Where trade actually happens, triangulated from three independent signals rather than counting mentions.
How people prove they really farm -- and what that implies for verifying them.
What the vocabulary failed to describe. Deliberately published.