Feed mixer: Helps farmers save on animal feeds

Kenneth Mulindwa is a piggery farmer in Lwengo District. On his farm, he has 73 pigs whose feeds he used to collect from hotels and restaurants from Masaka town.
However, this not only came at a transport cost but he also had to part with some money to buy food leftovers from the hotels and restaurants.

“I entered an agreement with five hotels and restaurants that would keep me leftovers collected during the day. I would drive my small pickup every evening to Masaka town to pick the food to feed the pigs till the next day.

I would spend between Shs20,000 to Shs30,000 on fuel on every route because my farm is deep in the village,” Mulindwa recalls, adding that altogether, he would spend close to Shs100,000 daily including the cost of leftover foods at the hotels and restaurants.
However, the story changed when Mulindwa bought a food mixer to produce his own pigs feeds such as the IMO solution.

Feed mixer
“After saving for about 16 months, I topped up Shs2m obtained from the farm and bought a feed mixer at Shs5.5m. I use it to mix any kind of feeds for my pigs,” he says.
David Lukwago, a poultry farmer in Luweero says besides ensuring that poultry nutrients are circulated well and balanced throughout the feeds in the process of mixing, the food mixer is time and labour saving compared to the manual way of mixing feeds using spades or hands.

“The amount of work the feed mixer does in 30 minutes can be done by more labourers in one or two days. This means that I have feeds for my chicken in a short time as opposed to hiring farm labourers,” Lukwago says. Patrick Semakula, the accounts assistant at Musa Body Machinery that locally fabricates feed mixers at Katwe in Kampala says the machine is an eight horse powered diesel engine that mixes all kinds of animal feeds.

These include poultry feeds such as maize brand and food for other animals such as sodium carbonate, shells, silver fish and fish food.
In 20 minutes, Semakula says the food mixer produces approximately 200 kilogrammes of animal feeds, which would otherwise take a farmer or their labourers more than an hour to come up or produce the same quantity of feeds.

Maintenance
The kind of servicing required for the feed mixer, Semakula says, is maintaining the engine by changing its oil after every two weeks. This, he says, is however dependent on how much feeds the machine is able to process in two weeks.
“When changing the engine oil, check the engine belt as well so that it does not wear out during processing,” he advises.