Prime
How smallholder farmers can survive amid growing land fragmentation
Michael Ssali
What you need to know:
"Young people in rural areas become farmers, working on small pieces of land on which they grow crops and keep livestock”
One of the biggest challenges facing agriculture today is the increasing population pressure on land. The boundaries of our country are not elastic but more and more people are born every day, almost all of them expecting to occupy some space on which to carry out an economic activity. Many young people in rural areas become farmers, working on small pieces of land on which they grow crops and keep livestock.
Land fragmentation is a real problem that keeps growing all the time as the population gets bigger. However it is not uncommon nowadays to hear of some powerful people driving smallholder farmers from the plots of land that they always believed to be theirs.
This only makes the situation worse because it drives more people into scrambling for land. If not paid attention to, land shortage results in reduced agricultural production. The soil on a small piece of land quickly gets won out due to over cultivation and repeated planting of the same crops.
To be productive, such gardens need regular application of manure to replace the nutrients used up by the crops. Agriculturalists recommend the use of livestock excreta to fertilise the soil all the time. The smallholder farmer is encouraged to keep livestock --- a goat, sheep, pigs, or chicken --- in order to easily get manure for his crops.
The livestock droppings mixed with animal beddings and any fodder grass left-over should be buried into the ground in the garden. Any weeds, except those that sprout easily, should also be ploughed into the soil.
Mulching with grass, crop residues or tree leaves is another way of adding nutrients to the soil because such materials decompose and turn into manure.
The idea of keeping livestock by smallholder farmers might sound frightening because most often they lack grazing land. But smallholder farmers can grow their own fodder grass and fodder trees, usually as boundaries for their small gardens or along the trenches dug across the fields to trap rainwater runoff.
They can also feed their animals on such things as banana peelings and other crop residues.
Other people make compost which is a mixture of animal excreta and rotting plant residues.
In their groups farmers should occasionally invite the area agricultural services officer to visit them and demonstrate to them how to make compost and how to carry out other farming practices.
Mr Michael Ssali is a veteran journalist,
[email protected]
