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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

By Chuck DuVivier

I have some experience with pigs, having raised about one thousand a year when I was younger. In a community of subsistence farming, hog rearing offers lots of possibilities. Farmers with better education, observation and management skills can work with the breeding sows and produce 8 week old, 20kg feeder pigs in an intensive farrowing operation. Success is measured by the number of healthy pigs produced per sow per year but a farmer needs knowledge of breeding, feeding, housing, disease management and much more. A farrowing operation needs to have access to capital for equipment and housing, feed and breeding stock. If an area has a source of well-bred, healthy, feeder pigs, then there is an opportunity for others to do the less intensive enterprise of hog feeding. Hog feeders can utilize whatever low cost feed that is available as long as they supplement to provide a balanced diet needed for fast growth. A hog feeding operation can be as large as one can manage or as small as one pig at a time and this allows people with very limited assets to participate.

Our morning farm visit had been to a close neighbor to check out his pigs and other pig farmers have asked for us to visit them as well. After the community meeting we headed over to Malima to visit a young man and see his pigs. Our first impressions were good. He had saved a considerable amount of money from crop farming to invest in breeding stock and a nicely designed set of pens which is pretty much how I would have advised him to proceed. But then he informed us that three months earlier he had lost 15 of his 20 pigs to African Swine Fever. The anguish and distress showed on his face and he confessed to us that he had lost faith that he could do anything successfully. We gave him a pep talk and told him we would try to help him with management so that he could put his life back together and, that he needed to believe in himself. How disappointing for us when we did some more research in the evening and found out ASF has no vaccine, is incurable and results in death or permanent stunting for any pigs that do survive. How can you manage your herd to control that kind of risk? The management of most livestock here is to turn them loose in the woods and hope for the best, so we have a long way to go. I need to talk to some veterinarians, some government agricultural agents, or some "successful" farmers to get help.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

People are fired up now. At yesterday's community meeting, I was invited to visit and consult with individuals at their farms or places of business. Actually, the head of the Rotary Community Corp took the floor to say they expected me to consult with them ALL and assigned appointments for me for the rest of the week. Before I came to Uganda, I had determined that individual farm visits should be my starting point for getting to know the issues better. That would have required that I have a vehicle and translator at my disposal all the time, which is not the case. Instead, we had many "meet the community" opportunities which are important but take time, are generally educational but can never be in-depth enough to actually base an action or management strategy on. Well today, I hit the ground running with five farm visits scheduled (only four of which we had time for). I am getting to see things now, crops in the field, animals up close, crops growing well and others damaged by blight, virus, drouth or weeds. We spend time talking about how each farmer is running his operation, and because it is one-on-one, the conversation is very open and I can ask just about any question I want to and get an honest reply. They know how they live, they know when they have cut corners and lost production because of it. They let me see their latrines, kitchens and bedrooms. They admit that they have lost animals or crops and felt helpless but knew they had to go on. They ask questions and I answer when I can, but I admit it when I can't.

We drive down back lanes to one of our visits, until the road gets too narrow. We then hike through fields and then brush that scrapes both shoulders as we pass and come into a homestead that is different from all the rest. Here there are blooming flowers and ornamental plants. We meet an elderly couple who clearly love their environment, their plants, their crops, their trees. Most trees around farms here look like leftovers from when there was a forest, stuck on the edge of fields or sometimes in the middle, they're still standing only because no one has gotten to them yet. At this homestead, old trees are welcome and they have been planting Musizi trees as seedling in the gardens. Cassava, maize, millet, bananas and more, grow under partial shade amongst the old and newer trees, and the couple report that they have Musizi trees reading to cut for timber after just four years! The trunks are straight enough to get two, fourteen foot long logs and the trees are 14-18" in diameter at chest height. New seedling are sprouting on the ground to replenish the cut trees or to transplant as seedlings. Since most of their land is just brushy and not used for crops, they are expanding the tree/gardens onto more and more of it. We applauded their agricultural practices and admired their thriving plants and told them if anything, they should step up the pace to expand more of their gardens since they want more income. A four year harvest cycle wouldn't seem too long for a younger farmer but for them it is a long time to wait.

One disadvantage to their system is how small scale it is. The low volume of logs to cut makes finding a buyer who is willing to pay decent prices almost impossible. I am sure that prices would be higher and more buyers would appear if enough farmers could adopt this method to produce a greater volume of these straight-grained, fine looking logs.

The elderly Musizi tree gardeners also presented me with a nice chicken, my first African consulting fee!

Members of the Kampala North RC had arrived and we returned for meetings and another community meeting at the school. All of our meetings are scheduled with a sliding time-frame, such as "two-for-two-thirty" which really means "two-forty-five or three, more or less." Sometimes it is frustrating when you are there on time and just have to wait and then later on you are pushed to hurry up and go because time is up. The group from Kampala brought Dr. Julius Wambete from the University of Makarere with them. He is working on a year old graduate program that is attempting to take agriculture/food processing/business students, provide them with a food processing lab, equipment and training in business product development which should then produce graduates who have a researched product and the skill to manage a business based on it. We had Julius speak briefly about product development and the concept adding value to products.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Today Fred took the health-oriented part of our group off to visit the hospital, so Patrick and I were forced to improvise. We had been assigned six business and farm visits spread from nearby to the far end of Iringa Parish so the boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) was our only option. Having witnessed local boda-boda madness I wasn't sure I wanted to be a passenger. A boda-boda would be fine but I am an avid motorcyclist and I insisted that I ride my own. Ten minutes later, two riders arrived, the fee was negotiated ($8 all day with drivers) and we headed to our visit with me on the back to start out.

Stop one was to visit a pretty good, crop-focused farmer and I had him demonstrate the method of hand-hoe digging used to harvest cassava tubers. He had harvested some of his large cassava field earlier with good results but we could now see the virus infected tubers rotting away and lowering his harvestable yields. I had been aware of the cassava virus from my research years ago and had heard that Uganda had developed and switched over to virus-resistant varieties several years back, but here, no one was aware of the issue until maybe six months ago when they started harvesting a were shocked by the rot. Some of the newer propagated plantings still were made with susceptible stock and are sure to be a total loss when harvesting starts 18 months later.

Other visits included some farms, confinement poultry projects, a private for-profit school and a beauty "saloon" (salon). The last two were at the Iringa trading center and both look healthy on paper, but owners tend to subsidize their businesses and not keep good records. They seldom know what is really going on and are not sure how to improve their sales or control their costs. Both would benefit from follow up coaching.

Our last stop was down the road toward Kamuli to visit the Handicapped Rotary Community Corp. I had visited this group last March and been impressed by their humble attitude, productivity and appreciation of Rotary. Nine of Mr. Kyakulagira's beehives are now colonized and his garden is huge and impressive. He has suffered losses because of the low rainfall received during the past late rainy season (September-October) just like everyone else has. Farmers here treat the two rainy seasons as if they are the same using the same crops for each and the same, very tall maize which needs so much water even though the September-October rains have always been less and more erratic. Planting crops that reduce the risk of loss from drought is essential but is not happening. I'm not sure how he takes care of such a large plot of land but Patrick says that he does it on his hands and knees because he can't work from his crutches. His is the only yard with mowed grass other than Patrick's that I have seen. Since their group keeps bees and works together, I gave them a set of coveralls, two folding veils, some gloves and the ABC to XYZ of Beekeeping to assist in their efforts.

We headed back to Iringa trading center to check on the painting at the clinic and then went on single track back trails all the way to Patrick's house. It was a good thing that I was following because I would never have been able to thread my way back on that maze of trails.

Friday, December 31, 2010

We started the day with more farm visits, first to a millet field which had failed from lack of rainfall and then to a homestead of a farmer/beekeeper. He had placed one of his hives right next to the huts where they spend most of their time and since African bees are known for their aggressiveness, I asked him why he had put it there. Over many centuries, the harvest of honey in Africa has been accomplished by ripping a hive apart and taking the combs of brood and honey, and it's no surprise that the bees have evolved toward aggressiveness. He said he was experimenting with the bees to teach them to be gentle. I commended him for experimenting and told him that since a bee's life is generally less than a few months, I thought that they would not "learn" anything in that period of time because there temperament was controlled by instinct. The family had not had any altercations with the bees and he said that they had modified their behavior to keep good relations, so they had learned how to keep the bees calm, which is still a good result for the experiment. He was disappointed that the bees weren't learning though.

The farmer produced honey and wax but had no market, some small decorative fuel saving stoves which I don't think he had sold, as well as crops. There is a real shortage of cash and selling any product is always a challenge.

After the community meeting we were told that we had two more farm visits so off we went. Farm one was after a long walk through the brush to a fenced inclosure where the farmer had 25 beehives. Some were Langstrom box hives, the result of a beekeepers' training project, and then some Kenyan box hives. After some research a few months ago, I have been ready to recommend the box hives as a cheaper, more appropriate hive for the area. The beekeeper said the box hives were deficient because the bees did not have enough space and mixed brood cells into the honey storage areas. He was thinking about a queen excluder screen which may work to fix the problem. They also had the same problem as the other beekeepers, no place to sell the honey so they just eat what they produce.

After visiting the bees, we headed to look at 30 "oak" trees, I am unsure of the species but the owner wants to cut them for logs. Under the trees were sisal gardens, cassava, cotton, and maize, and because the soil was very sandy, they all were getting some benefit from the shade. We didn't have much advice except to say, maybe he shouldn't cut them just yet. Patrick is thinking about a plan to buy timber like that but leave it standing for a personal longer term investment. He will have to work that out. The villagers asked us to see their waterhole which was very unsanitary. There is a borehole for the area, but it pumps only a trickle at certain times of the year, so people won't stand in line and just head for the nasty waterhole.

It had been a long and busy day, but we still took time to visit the clinic, the carpenter who is working on the computer lab furniture, and the community center construction progress before returning after dark to showers, dinner and bed.