Michael Ssali
Quite a lot of attention is currently paid to the high prices enjoyed by coffee farmers in all the crop’s growing regions across the country. The people who had earlier invested in coffee growing or trading are now reaping big profits.
Many people are clearing bushes and creating space for planting coffee. Others are investing in coffee nurseries in order to sell seedlings to intending farmers. The economic activity has provided some employment to many youths, working in gardens picking coffee, carrying heavy coffee bags from the gardens to farmers’ stores, and engaging in the daily coffee drying activities as the cherries are spread out in the yard for drying under the sun.
This is a big chance for the youths to observe that there is money to be earned from farming even if they don’t necessarily become coffee farmers. By planting cabbages or sukuma-wiki, or green pepper and taking good care of the vegetables the grower exchanges them for money after a few months.
Robert Munyolo Aganze a resident of Manywa Village, Kyanamukaaka Sub-county, in Masaka District, is now a prosperous small-scale vegetable farmer who used the farming skills that were provided to him as a young boy at Kitovu Mobile Farm School and at St Jude Institute of Agro-ecology Busense in Masaka District.
He is now self-employed, a married man, and a father of some children. “We were taught how to practice commercial farming on a small piece of land,” he once told Seeds of Gold.
It is well known that for the majority of our youths, lack of land for farming is a key barrier. This is the reason why training institutions such as Mbuye Agricultural College in Rakai are training the youths in carrying out successful agriculture on small plots of land.
But teaching farming skills should not be a preserve of agricultural institutes; Teacher Training Colleges should be supported to turn out school teachers that can pass on the skills to all the children in the country because we are fighting unemployment, poverty, and hunger. All the schools should have space for school gardens where the children are given hands-on experience in crop production and animal husbandry.
The children should have rainwater saving skills and they should be introduced to all soil conservation practices. Otherwise it is not helpful to tell the youth to become farmers without giving them the needed skills.
