How Munyoloaganze has defied the dry season on his farm

Robert Munyoloaganze, a resident of Manywa Village, Kyannamukaaka Sub-county, Masaka District is a successful smallholder farmer who is also keen on sharing his farming skills with other people particularly the youths that are interested in farming but have small plots of land.

“Some of the farming practices that I share were taught to me at Kitovu Mobile Farm School and at St Jude Institute of Agro-ecology but there are still others that I have discovered myself,” he says.

How he does it

When Seeds of Gold visited him, the area had not received rain for about two months and there was a big shortage of vegetables. “I have been able to grow some vegetables despite the dry period,” he said.

“And the trick is simple. Just dig a hole about a foot deep. Upon getting to the red or brown soil, dig a bit deeper to remove some of the red or brown soil. Replace it with the surface soil and place on it some green grass or some uprooted weeds. Then cover that too with soil mixed with livestock droppings but make sure you do not completely fill up the hole. Plant the vegetable that you want to be growing during the dry season. Then cover the surrounding area with grass or any other mulching material,” he says.   He goes on to say that the farmer will still need to do some irrigation but it will not have to be as frequent as the case would be if he had just planted the crop in a mere hole filled with soil. He said he has done this for crops such as nakati, carrots, green pepper, sweet pepper and spinach. He said that results are even better when the hole is dug in the form of a trench, for people who want to grow crops such as carrots in straight lines.

“I carry out irrigation only once a week by applying about a litre of water on each plant yet if I had not put grass underneath I would need to water the crop twice a week,” says Munyoloaganze. In times of rain scarcity such as the country is going through such farming tricks are quite helpful.

Sweet pepper

He is particularly pleased with a climber vegetable known as sweet pepper whose seed he obtained through collaboration with Cross Man Seed, a US based NGO. He has about 30 sweet pepper plants and he disclosed that he gets Shs180,000 from selling their fruits every month.

He intends to plant more in the next rain season. “Each fruit is sold at Shs100 here, which you may call the farm gate price. But in Masaka Town I sell each fruit at Shs1500,” he says.

He harvests more than 300 sweet pepper fruits every week and his best customers are Valley Cave Restaurant, Banana Chick Restaurant and Farmers Budget Shop.

Value addition

The farmer, however, grows other types of vegetables and adds value to some of them. He has tinned katunkuma powder and tangawuzi powder and several tinned vegetables for sale. He also grows a medicinal herb called stevia which he refers to as ‘natural green sugar’ which he says is very helpful to diabetic people. “Most people who suffer from diabetes have been advised not to use ordinary sugar sold in common shops but lots of them, particularly priests, who have heard about this plant come to me to get it and it is what they use instead of ordinary sugar,” he says. He says he came to learn about it from Professor Julius Nyanzi, (Nkozi University) one of the many people he has met during farming training courses. He says stevia leaves are harvested and dried under the shade. When they are fully dry they are pounded or crushed into powder and packed in tins.

Munyoloaganze who also keeps pigs, chicken, goats, and rabbits says it is important for all crop farmers to keep livestock. “They are very important sources of natural manure besides exchanging them for money every now and again,” he says. “Feeding them should not be such a big worry as some of them eat vegetable residues. There are also lots of fodder grass and fodder trees that a farmer can plant all around his garden.”

Skilling youths

An opinion leader in his home area, Kityamuwesi Musubire, has set up a number of development projects to skill the youth in many fields including carpentry, tailoring, and farming and value addition. Munyoloaganze disclosed that he is privileged to be appointed by Kityamuwesi to assist in providing farming skills to the youths at one of the projects known as Ebenezer Skilling and Mentoring Centre. He is in charge of the farming section but he told Seeds of Gold that the projects were badly hit by the Covid-19 lockdowns.

“We are slowly reorganising and very soon we will be back on course,” he says. There are flourishing vegetable gardens at the centre and hundreds of rabbits complete with cages built to trap and collect rabbit urine and droppings for use as manure.

Munyoloaganze also helps to give some basic farming skills to young school children at Miles of Smile Learning Centre, a school in his village. “From a very young age the children are introduced to farming apart from learning reading and writing,” he says. The infant school has small vegetable plots and rabbit cages as well as a goat. The school also has some local chicken. Paul Wasswa who is the school director says, “We want our children to be all round. We want to give them not only classroom education but to expose them also to what goes on in the world around them. They learn for example that animals drink water too. They learn that crops should be irrigated when there is no rain. They learn what animals such as goats eat and they get to know how long it takes for the hen to hatch its young ones. They are not just told these things but the see them and participate in some of the activities.”

Advice

Munyoloaganze who also keeps pigs, chicken, goats, and rabbits says it is important for all crop farmers to keep livestock. “They are very important sources of natural manure besides exchanging them for money every now and again,” he says. “Feeding them should not be such a big worry as some of them eat vegetable residues. There are also lots of fodder grass and fodder trees that a farmer can plant all around his garden.”