A generous Mother Nature has often been blamed for the general lack of innovation among Ugandan farmers.
Gifted with a beautiful climate, fertile soils and a host of other free resources, farmers in Uganda tend to take it easy, confident that Mother Nature will always provide for their needs.
This complacency, however, must stop, if not for anything else, for the fact that the usually generous Mother Nature has of late become unpredictable with her favours.
The rains tend to come either too early or too late, sometimes too heavy, causing destructive floods and mud slides. The soils, too, are getting exhausted, as a result of mismanagement. It is time farmers stopped taking for granted the abundant resources around them and instead find ways of utilising them.
Last week, we talked about the need for farmers to start investing in rain harvesting and irrigation technology as a way of dealing with the increasingly fickle Mother Nature.
In this week’s issue of Harvest Money, Farm Expert Professor Edward Kakonge shows poultry farmers how they can enrich their birds’ diet by adding crashed egg shells to their feeds. These are usually just thrown away, especially in urban areas, where eggs are consumed in large quantities.
In the same issue, a farming couple in Buloba off Mityana road demonstrates how locally available resources can be used to construct durable farm structures, with their mud and wattle poultry house.
The same couple has invested in a slaughter-house on their farm premises, as a way of adding value to their meat products.
Besides increasing their profit margin, the slaughterhouse will save the farming couple from the human Marabou Storks that hover around public abattoirs waiting to scavenge on poor livestock farmers. This is what innovative farming is all about.
