BEST OF THE BEST FARMERS AND THE RIPPLE EFFECT ON UGANDA

A week or so the New Vision celebrated the best of the best farmers from 2014 to 2018 Best Farmer competitions.

 Since 2014 New Vision has been profiling farmers who qualify to compete to determine who is the best.  The winners in addition to getting help to improve their farms, are flown to the Netherlands to learn from farmers. Another major sponsor of the event is dfcu bank.

"A better country than the Netherlands to use as an example, it would be hard to find. The Netherlands is second only to the US in terms of agricultural exports, in 2019 recording

€94.5b (sh366trillion), it accounts for a third of world chill, lettuce and cucumber trade and a fifteenth of apple production. Uganda’s agricultural exports in 2021 came in at about $5b(sh18.3trillion).

They produce four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chicken annually. And as if that is not enough they have 24,000 acres or an area half the size of Kampala, under greenhouses.

This made all the more amazing when you realise that the Netherlands occupies about 42,000 km², a sixth of the area of Uganda.

Interestingly they have managed this high agricultural productivity while reducing water usage by 90 percent and ferterliser use just as dramatically over the years.

Just by looking at the numbers one can tell that the Dutch farmer has attained a level of efficiency and productivity, we can only dream of in Uganda, with our better weather, more arable land and double annual seasons.

One local ranch owner with a herd in the hundreds and lands stretching over a few square miles, on return from Netherlands years ago, concluded that we were joking in Uganda. He was put to shame by a farmer he visited who with a fraction of his herd and situated on barely 10 acres of land was producing more milk than he, many times over, with only he and his son as the permanent workers on the farm.

So, one of the tests of the best of the best farmers is whether they had improved their farming practice after their return from the Netherlands.

All the best farmers have returned from the Netherlands with the expanded outlook, improved their farming methods and increased their productivity.

Since 2014 the Dutch embassy and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines have sponsored the travel of 58 farmers, a motley crew that represent every region of the country. The best farmers have not only improved their farms but have proved useful resource for their communities. Many of them set up training institutions to transmit their knowledge...

It is not a stretch of imagination to think that if each of the farmers influenced 100 other that is 5800 farmers and if each of these influenced another ten and then … you get the drift.

There is a difference between politicians urging us to turn to agriculture or extension workers directing us what to do, but when we see one of our own working under in our context working and succeeding it is a higher level of learning.

And if the New Vision can keep facilitating the travel of our best farmers to the Netherlands the rural landscape can very well be transformed in our lifetime.

"While industrialization is what we aspire to, most countries transformed by first ensuring that they produced food surpluses. This did two things it ensured food security, which meant they reduced on their use of vital foreign exchange to import food and secondly, the surpluses beyond exporting them formed the basis of their agro-industries.... 

One of the things they learnt in the Netherlands is how to add value to their products and many of the best farmers now have cottage industries, processing their produce for use in their communities. Will be surprised when these same farmers become the backbone of our future agro-industrial base?

But the highlight of the event for me is when I sat with Flora Kakande of Pumpkin King. Her company grows and process pumpkin into a variety of products, but in addition is working to help farmers grow pumpkin, including refugees in western Uganda. Everything of the pumpkin is usable and have huge health benefits.

After hearing their story I wondered aloud why people like them do not make noise about what they do as the idlers who make more noise in begging ‘Gavumenti Etuyambe”

“But we are working when do we find time to make noise,” was her quick rejoinder.