The pigs

A pig feeding/having its meal . Photo credit: Martin

Done weeding

Thank God for I done with the second round of weeding this planting seasons today, and the next thing that I’m to do is spraying my tomatoes and cabbages with pesticide to protect  them from pest.The tomato plants have started flowering so i think pretty soon it will start bearing it fruit. I’m happy for that cause my research is going as I expected. I just can’t explain my joy however i am still cautionary as an English proverb goes "Don’t count your chicks before they hatch". I’m also planning to introduce bee keeping but I am still carrying out research about it,if all goes well i should begin mid next month.

Harvest

We harvested the maize using the local people in the area although they charged me a lot more than usual because they had money form their own harvest. I harvested the 10acres which gave us less than what we had expected to get, this was because the second round of weeding was not done very well. I was disappointed with what was got but I didn’t let it put me down cause it was the first time I was doing agriculture on my own and when it's your first time doing something you will be faced with some challenges, so that didn’t let my hopes down. 

I decided to plant second season which started in September during this time I purchased some bulls that would help me ox-plow the land, I cleared the land after which I  plowed it and planted maize, I have reduced on the acres form ten to just seven to allow for effective management. I look forward to the next harvest , to see how many bags I can get from each acre of maize planted and the total from all seven acres. I also decided to introduce new crops like tomatoes, cabbages, onions. I’m researching if these crops can also do well in the area before I can get into full production next year during the first season, i planted about one acre which I’m handling well at the moment.

Growing Maize

The rocketing food prices did not escape me as a pig farmer, I feed my pigs on maize bran, vegetation and when my pocket allows i buy blood from the cattle slaughter houses. However with the inflation I went from buying a kilogram of maize bran at 100 to 1200 Ugandan shillings in the space of 3 months. It was so difficult to adjust to these high prices, and so i decided to grow some maize, the plan was to mill it into flour for sale and feed the bran to my pigs, with about 50 pigs to feed this would be quite a saving......perfect idea right!

And so I leased some 10acres of land, had it cleared and the maize planted, i was to learn that maize is not as easy a crop as i expected, well I guess this being my first crop I had a lot to learn, there was the planting  season for instance, Nanda has two planting seasons as opposed to my home village in northern Uganda where maize is grown once a year. I also learned that the maize crop required two weeding rounds in a singular plating if the crop was to do well. It  was a tough planting season but i have taken the lessons the same mistakes will not be made next plating season.

How it all started years back

Farming has always been my dream, from childhood when I used to see my dad grow some crops like maize and rice in Lira. My dad would take me with him whenever he would be visiting his farm. I thus grew to love agriculture from a tender age of 10 year, when I turned 20 years it was the moment when I had to make the biggest decision of my life. I questioned myself where I would want to be in the next five years, and so i took the idea I had and decided to put it into practice because there is a huge gap in the agricultural business in Uganda and Africa at large, our government and those who could afford to do not engage in farming  to its fullest potential.

In the beginning of 2009 I was now 21 years old, and begun to research about my idea and so it dawned on me there would be a hindrance, how was i to get the finances to start my dream, i went to my sister and asked her to loan me some four hundred thousand Ugandan(160US$), she agreed to lend me the money. Once i had the I decided to purchase a few piglets, for my research had revealed that piggery was a more profitable business due to the high demand for pork in Uganda for there are many pork joints around the country. So i purchased four piglets at the cost of fifty thousand shillings (20US$) at that time and leased some land (50squaremetres) in a place called Kigumba along Kampala-Gulu highway for which I paid ten thousand shilling (4US$) for a month.

Towards the end of 2009 i had 35pigs and piglets however in September that I had to start my 2 year diploma course in Business Administration.I asked one my cousin to come and help me with keeping the pigs and every two weeks I would be going to Kigumba and checking on the pigs, an so i set off for books, i sent money for feeding and other operational expenses between September 2009 to December 2010 and my cousin was doing well helping me. We had done so well and we now had a sizable number of pigs, my plan was to sell some during my break in holidays January 2011 but i to take my dad for treatment in India and that is when things started changing.

When i came back I found that my cousin had sold some of my pigs when I asked him for the money he could not give me accountability, my investigations led me to discover a changed lifestyle for he had taken to the bottle. I would not taken any chances so i decided to remove him from my project and called upon my bother Richard to help me. By March Richard was now in control and quite settled in.I spent a lot of time with the project during the transition and decided to grow my own feeds for the pigs so that I could reduce on always having to buy feeds.I was feeding them on maize brand and so we cultivated ten hectors of land with maize which did very well and when I got done with books in June, I joined Richard just in time for harvest. I am now mostly based at my farm and making strides one day at a time.

The animal called ‘Pig’

I found when i decided to be come a farmer that the most lucrative livestock in Uganda was the pig, and so my research about pigs begun,here is some of what i have so far learned.

Pigs are omnivores which means they eat both plants and animals as their primary food source. They are highly social and intelligent animals. Pigs are fed mostly on corn and soyabean meal with a mixture of vitamins and minerals added to the diet. At my farm, the pigs meal is mixed with blood from the cattle to provide for the added mineral content.

Domesticated pigs are commonly raised as livestock by farmers for meat (generally called pork, hams, gammon or bacon), It is also a common ingredient in sausages. The pig skin may be used leather and their bristly hairs used for brushes.Pork is one of the most widely eaten meats in the world, accounting for about 38% of meat production worldwide, although consumption varies widely from place to place.² In Uganda grilled/smoked pork is the most popular form enjoyed as evidenced by the numerous pork joints across the country.

However pigs can harbour a range of parasites and diseases that can be transmitted to humans. These include trichinosis, Taenia solium, cysticercosis, and brucellosis. Pigs are also known to host large concentrations of parasitic ascarid worms in their digestive tract.¹  It is hence advised to eat  cured or well cooked meat at all times.

This little piece of research gave me a peak into the general feeding habits of pigs and the products that were available from the animal and well an insight into their social behavior. It was also the basis for more detailed researches that i am carrying out plus it gave me an idea of what was achievable from pig farming as a business.

¹ The Pig Health, http://www.thepigsite.com/pighealth/

² Raloff, Janet. Food for Thought: Global Food Trends. Science News Online. May 31, 2003^.

 

I got robbed!

Its been several months since I decided to leave the city life of cable TV, internet, electricity, a bed and all other comforts for life in Nanda, often when I told my colleagues I was off in Nanda.They always immediate asked 'Where is that?' ….Nanda is located close to Karuma I tell them in 'Ohhhh!' they cry in realisation and within the same breath ask why I would do that!.

It is hard to explain to my friends that I choose to sleep in a grass thatched, mud walled hut and  that I would choose to spend hours in the fields . I try to tell them that I decided to become a farmer just like they choose to be doctors, teachers or lawyers. 'I want to be a farmer' and at that they shake their heads or mutter something unintelligible, i understand them for farming is not considered a career in Uganda.

And so on days  like this I am tempted to move back to the city permanently, for while no one was home some people broke into my hut making off with many basic items and my solar lamp a rare piece and perhaps my most prized possession in the hut .I thought living in rural Nanda where farms do not need fences meant it was safe , sure our walls are not strong enough but neither are our doors, having visited the rural area quite often growing up, it s not often that residents even locked theirs doors and so imagine my surprise at finding a huge hole in the wall of my hut. Times have indeed changed!

On realisation that i had just been robbed when i got home that evening, i was cursing the reasons for having had to be a way from my compound for so long, but the local council leader had called a meeting. I had only recently moved my pigs from Kigumba, and my neighbours being largely moslem were complaining about the presence of pigs in their area.i had spent most of the meeting being cautiously explaining that the land was private and that I could do whatever I wanted on it, the law is clear on this issue.

I had hastily transferred my pigs from Kigumba and as such had not had the time or money to construct proper housing for them, I had quickly put up a make shift sty but the rains were not in on my plans and they quickly destroyed my little setup causing a mess and leaving the place in such a stench.This issue i promised to resolve and asked the community to give me a week, but where was I to get quick money to set up a proper sty. My eventual plan is to generate natural gas from the pigs waste for electricity on my farm I read somewhere that this was possible but its too costly and i need to research it further. All i could raise was some money for the construction which is now almost complete, for now the waste is being turned into manure - the gas will just have to wait a few more harvest.

Gone Farmer

After completing my diploma at an higher education institution in Kampala, I felt I had done enough as regards following the long standing tradition of school going, and so I would not go on to complete my degree just yet. I had already foregone starting my agricultural project for 2years, and 3 more years at the university just didn't cut it.

Myself the farmer on a field being cleared for planting.

Photo Credit: Stella

While pursuing my diploma I partnered with a friend but the partnership went awry for I had borrowed some money to acquire a few piglets but months later I was in debt with very little to show for it but a few scraggly piglets and a ramshackle pigsty, for most of the piglets had died or gone missing without reason.

I don't consider myself a failure and to quit would have meant i had failed so I went back to the drawing board, the end result a proposal to purchase 40 piglets, I assured my creditor that no matter what I would succeed this time.And so with some money in hand I purchased 31 piglets rather than the planned 40, for the price of a piglet was not spared by the ongoing inflation and growing fuel prices.

Now several months later i have 50 pigs , when I walk into a pork joint in Kampala I look forward to the day when I will be served a plate gratis as a supplier.

No one really tells you  it's not as easy ...no wikigardens or wikifarms just wikileaks but its my chosen path and the journey just begun!

'Posho'

Maize(Corn) flour, Nshima or Ugali in Swahili and we Ugandans call it posho, now I cannot take any claim on the legitimacy of what I am about to write but as I have been told by one before me who probable heard from another before him, the story of  posho dates back to the colonial days.

Colonized by the British in 1894, Uganda gained her independence on the 9^th day of October in 1962. The British however would leave us  with maize which is said to have been brought to Africa from the Americas by the Europeans, today corn meal is not only eaten in Uganda but across many African countries it is referred to differently depending on which part of Africa you are from.

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Posho forms the main part of the daily meals for many Ugandans; it can be used to make nutritious porridge for breakfast or cooked into thick bread eaten with a stew at lunch or dinner. It is the most widely served meal in schools and other institutions in Uganda. It also has many other uses; it can also be used to starch belts my sister tells me, for when they run out of starch in high school they used maize flour to starch their belts, I have also known it to be used as glue in nursery school. So that’s how important maize is to Ugandans.

Before I forget, ours is a family were stories were shared by the fire when my dad was a young boy and even though we no longer had the luxury of evening fires by which to tell stories my dad maintained the tradition of story telling, and one evening he says do you know how posho came to be and we all shook our heads to indicate no, with wide eyes depicting our interest, often enough he begun a story this way. So he goes on to say in the colonial days the colonial masters used slaves to do a lot of the work be it farming or in factories and it was the duty of the master to feed his slaves, maize which is high in carbohydrates was a favoured meal to be given to the slaves because it made them strong and was quite filling, and so when the meal break bell was rang the master ordered the slaves to go for their portions, I guess to a Ugandan who spoke no English and heard the master from a distance could not make out the pronounced ‘n’ at the end of the word and that's how the maize meal became posho.

Happy Independence Day to all Ugandans...........the struggle continues!

The pearl of Africa

I was born and raised Ugandan; my country is also called the pearl of Africa. Uganda is a landlocked country bordered to the east by Kenya and to the north by the youngest nation in the world, South Sudan in a region known as East Africa. She is home to Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake and source of Nile, the second longest river in the world. 

Grass thriving on dormant land in Gulu district, northern Uganda
Photo Credit: Stella

Uganda's climate is tropical divided into two seasons a rainy season (April - November) and a dry season (December - March) with an average temperature of 26 degrees celsius. Our climate is ideal for agricultural success but many young Ugandans shun farming because it is tedious and prefer white or blue collar jobs hence we languish in poverty and unemployment because we do not use the abundant and dormant land for productivity.

It has however not always been like this, I never met my grandfather but I know he tilled the land for his own food and the land paid my dad’s way through school and clothed him, and like his father before him my dad even though with a white collar job engaged in farming for our own family’s consumption.

Many Ugandans like my father are subsistence farmers, producing for consumption and only selling the surplus. In Uganda food is often purchased fresh from the markets having only been harvested the same morning or the previous afternoon; meat is largely consumed from animals slaughtered the same day, however Uganda suffers its share of food insecurity and famine especially in the north and north eastern regions which have suffered war and prolonged drought respectively.

My country is multicultural  and so the food grown in differs depending on the area under consideration,  in central Uganda mainly inhabited by the Bantu matooke (plantain) is the common staple food in the north its is millet. However one food seems to transcend all cultural and tribal borders, maize is eaten across not only Uganda but Africa; in Uganda we normally call this meal posho, a name with an interesting origin. I will tell you all about it tomorrow.

So here i am!

I have always told stories of my agricultural adventures and I would tell my family that one day when I became a mind-boggling large scale farmer and people asked as they so often do, how I made it I would tell them the story of how I began with one piglet.

And so the purpose of this blog is to share these stories in near real time, I want to enrich other young farmers through my own exposure so that they can know better where mistakes were made. I also hope that other agriculturist will share  their experiences with me and my readers.

This journey that i am about to take with you begun about a year ago and it's a shame i did not start to share sooner, but i am sure in due time it will seem we took the first step together. It has been an interesting beginning but the best is yet to be lived (wink).