Kiggundu’s efforts to keep grasshoppers, crickets on farm

Deo Kiwanuka Kiggundu shows breeding house made of wire mesh and nets to prevent grasshoppers and crickets from flying out. PHOTOS BY MICHAEL J SSALI

Grasshoppers are a much-sought delicacy, especially in central Uganda and many people look forward to eating them during particular seasons of the year—April to May and November to December. But grasshoppers are not farmed insects; to most people, it is not quite clear where they come from.
In many towns, some people set up traps during the seasons and this becomes their full-time occupation and source of income.
Grasshopper vending provides employment to several youths although it is often blamed for driving children out of school and from their homes—ending up as street children in such towns as Masaka, Kyotera and elsewhere.
In Masaka Town alone, 725 people are engaged in trapping as a business under the Uganda Basenene Development Group. A survey carried out in 2013 by Seeds of Gold revealed that none of them had any idea where the insects come from.

Potential value
However, according to Deo Kiwanuka Kiggundu, a retired industrial mechanical technician, now a resident of Jjanngano village, Buwunga Sub-county in Masaka District, the grasshoppers have an origin and can be farmed like other insects such as bees.
The 69-year-old visited Malawi as a young man and he remembers seeing swarms of grasshoppers resting on the sand along swamps. He was told that is where they laid eggs before setting off to fly across entire countries on the continent.
“They come with the monsoon winds,” he says. “When I was approached by the district authorities to join an effort by Makerere University’s School of Forestry, Environment, Tourism and Geographical Sciences to breed grasshoppers, I readily accepted because I thought I had an idea about the insects’ origin and early life,” he told Seeds of Gold during a visit to his farm where he also breeds crickets and keeps bees, among other activities.

“Grasshoppers are a rich source of protein. Breeding and rearing them could be profitable in the future,” he explained.
“Moreover their legs and wings, which are plucked off and thrown away as waste can be dried and crushed into chicken and fish feed.”
On the crickets, which are known as bunyenyenkule in Luganda, he said: “Cricket powder mingled with wheat flour can make delicious cakes. We have made cakes and taken them to a number of agricultural shows and sold out.

They too are rich in protein and could be used in making chicken feed to supplement mukene (silver fish) whose stocks in the lake are dwindling. I strongly believe that this project is bound to be of great commercial value.”
That the insects have a potential agricultural value has been borne out by the success of a poultry farmer—Ahmed Nsubuga of Kitenga village near Masaka Town, who keeps about 6,000 hens.
He told Seeds of Gold: “I kept 100 hens in a separate enclosure and fed them on maize bran mixed with grasshopper and cricked powder. I registered almost 100 per cent egg collection every day. With ordinary chicken feeds, the average daily collection per day is between 85 and 90 eggs.”

Breeding grasshoppers
Kiggundu’s grasshopper breeding house is made out of wire mesh. Its roof is a papyrus carpet covered with a polythene sheet.
Inside, there are four grasshopper rearing cages and five or so cricket breeding crater crates.
The cages measure two and half feet high, three feet wide and seven feet long. The wire mesh is covered by a netting.
In the cage, he laid sand into which the grasshoppers lay the eggs.

“It is important to create an atmosphere that is conducive for them to reproduce and that is why you see the grass in the cage erected to look like bush for the grasshoppers to hide in,” he explained.
He added that the best temperature for breeding grasshoppers is between 27 and 31 degrees Celsius.
The grasshopper eggs should hatch within about two and half months. One grasshopper can have from 20 to 50 young ones.
“They practise cannibalism. The mother grasshopper eats its offspring and it is strongly recommended to remove the other grasshoppers after eggs have started to hatch.”
Grasshoppers are herbivorous and he feeds them on green leaves, which is the reason he grows vegetables in a garden, which is just outside the breeding house.

“The grasshoppers that we eat here are in the same family as locusts but the grasshoppers eat less plant material than the locusts, which have been known to wipe out entire crop fields,” Kiggundu pointed out.
“But they also feed on maize bran mixed with soya flour. They drink water too but it has to be given to them cautiously because if it is merely placed in a container such as a cup or a plate they may drown.”
So he puts the water on a small plate into which he places cotton wool. It is into the cotton wool that the grasshopper pushes its mouth to drink the water.

“If you put the water on a rather flat container without cotton wool it is good to place some stones in the water so that the grasshopper has a place on which to stand. Alternatively, the water may be sprinkled on the vegetable leaves so that as they eat the leaves they also imbibe the water.”
He said it takes between five and six months for the hatched grasshoppers to mature.
From one breeding cage, Kiggundu expects a minimum of two thousand five hundred grasshoppers. From four breeding cages so far, he hopes to get about 10,000 grasshoppers.

Plan for the future
He is however quick to point out that as far as he is concerned what he is currently doing may not appear to be paying financially but it is a simple research on the possibility of breeding the insects for big commercial purposes in the future.
“First trials are not always the most successful but with time, I know, grasshopper breeding and farming will become a paying occupations,” he said with confidence.

Most of the green grasshoppers eaten in Uganda are female. “They have a tail which they use to penetrate the sand in preparation for laying the eggs. Generally, in an area where you have 15 grasshoppers only two are male and these have no tails.”
He disclosed that as the grasshopper season sets in, the green-coloured ones (known as kkulumbisi in Luganda) are much more than the khaki-coloured ones (known as kkulunkalu) whose numbers tend to increase as the season draws to an end. Most of the khaki ones are male.

“Their different colours are also meant by nature to help them hide safely within their immediate environment. The green ones tend to hide among growing crops in farmland while the khaki ones hide in the bush.
There are yet others with purple stripes (kibazzibazzi) and those that are entirely purple (ennangila) which hide better in forested land.”
For breeding purposes, Kiggundu prefers to catch the parent stock from the wild instead of trapping them with bright electric lights as is done by most grasshopper hunters.
“The parent stock must be strong and completely normal,” he explained.

“If they have broken legs or wings they cannot be used since they may even die due to the serious injuries. Those trapped by electric lights are too tired by the time they are caught and most of them die within hours.”
He employs some people to physically catch grasshoppers which they must keep in well ventilated traditional grasshopper containers known as enkanga.
“If they don’t have enkanga they are advised to keep the grasshoppers in transparent plastic bottles into which holes have been made to allow them to breath. I buy each live grasshopper at Shs100.”

To breed crickets, Kiggundu must first of all sterilise the soil in which they will lay eggs by heating it.
The female crickets have two tails while the male have three tails. He must also get good, intact, parent stock for breeding purposes.
“The cricket eggs take between 15 and 20 days to hatch if the weather is good,” he said adding that it takes about 90 days for the crickets to mature.

Other insects

“I am also part of the Bee Population and Bee Health Research team which seeks to restore and increase the population of bees in the world,” he says.
Before turning to grasshopper breeding, Deo Kiwanuka Kiggundu was already an accomplished volunteer environment conservationist in the sub-county. He sensitises the community about the dangers of environment degradation and advantages of conservation.

He was also a member of such organisations as Nature Uganda, World Wide Fund for Nature, Uganda Wild Life and Wild Life Club of Kenya. His special attachment is to the protection of indigenous trees, medicinal plants, and fruit trees.
In his homestead are hundreds of native trees and shrubs, under which hang bee hives from which he regularly harvests honey. He is also the chairman of Kasimbi Development Association.