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Sunday, June 10, 2018
Agriculture
During the agricultural visit, we toured farmer John's land to obtain a more in depth understanding of small-scale agriculture in the rural village. John explained the many challenges that accompany small-scale farming such as issues with lack of payment by the government, and loss of crops due to climate change. Along with those issues, small-scale farming is not a field in which many young people take an interest and talked about a few ways in which that could be a benefit to have them learn more. With the population expanding, more small scale farming will help to improve the economy and maybe even production later down the line. What other issues did anyone observe with small-scale farming?
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Another issue I was informed about during our visit was value addition. The easiest way for me to explain value addition is this: value is added to a product through the process of changing or transforming a product from its original state to a more valuable state. For instance, we spoke with a farmer who sold cocoa beans for a cheap price compared to a finished chocolate product. Reymond asked why the farmer did not work towards producing his own chocolate bars and the farmer explained that he did not think he would be able to compete with developed countries because their products are seen as better quality. The farmer also explained the paperwork he would need to produce final products was extremely expensive.
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Concerning the farms that we saw, they were definitely on the large/massive scale for a farm in Uganda. This was perhaps one of the largest things that stuck out to me because of my agriculture background. Our farms in the US are small when they are 200 acres or less. However, in Uganda 200 acres is considered absolutely astronomical with only a handful of farms reaching this scale. One thing I really admired about this was both the crop variety, and crop rotation throughout the year given the different times of year. In the US we seem to find 1-4 crops that we like and we try to specialize in those on a large scale. On John's farm, we saw 12+ varieties of crops that would be sold on an open market setting with a very small portion going toward the household. I found this very interesting.
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