Making animal silage

Please advise me on how to make sweet potato vine silage?

Denis Onyango

Dear Denis,
Many farmers spend huge sums of money buying feeds for their pigs.
However, the feed costs can be drastically reduced if farmers can learn how to make sweet potato vines silage which has been proved to be nutritious and palatable to pigs.

If sweet potato vines are well-prepared and preserved they can be a good supplement for pigs.
Below we give you simple steps on how to prepare and store sweet potato silage:
Cut 60-100 kilogrammes of sweet potato vines and spread them to wilt in the sun for about 30 minutes.
Chop the vines into tiny pieces and mix them with 10 kilogrammes of maize germ or pig growers mash.
Sprinkle half kilogramme of mineral salt and mix thoroughly.

Put the mixture into an airtight 250-litre plastic tank. Compress the vines firmly to remove any airspace as you do when preparing silage.

Add some little EM1 solution to improve the quality of the silage.
Cover the tank airtight. Let it stay for 14 days (two weeks).
Open the tank to check if the silage is ready. If the silage has a sweet smell and has turned yellow in colour, then it is ready for feeding.
You can feed the sweet potato silage to pigs from four months of age, sows and gilts (young female pigs) and boars (male pigs) at any time before and after their usual daily rations.
Pig farmers who feed sweet potato silage to their pigs regularly can cut their feed costs by 30 per cent. In addition, the sweet potato tubers can be eaten or sold in the market.

Pig farmers can also feed their pigs with sukumawiki, cabbages, lucerne, amaranth, pawpaws or bananas.
Hotel leftovers can be given but farmers must ensure that the feed is not contaminated by boiling it to ensure that all disease- causing organisms are destroyed.

Answered by Andrew Otai, CEO Piggery Farming Market

How can I start a profitable bee keeping enterprise?

Andrew Apiliga

Dear Andrew
To start a honey bee farm, you must have an area of land that is removed from residential set-up.
This is to minimise sting incidences. Although bees can be dangerous, you need to have a fence or wall round your farm to keep thieves at bay.

Your bee hive boxes must be ready. It must be built in such a way that it allows for easy harvesting of honey.
You should get a skilled carpenter for this. If you can perform a good job by constructing your own boxes, then by all means you should do so.

After constructing your boxes, the next step is to get the bees! How is this possible? Simple!
All you need to do is simply buy some honey. Especially the unprocessed one. This is not a rule of thumb as you can use any one you can lay your hands on.

This should be placed in the boxes. You can smear the honey within the boxes and hang them in a safe location where they will not be vandalised. Before long, the bees will come calling. The other alternative is physically collecting the bees from the wild and introducing them to the hive. Remember as a must to have bee forage plants around your farm.
They will occupy these boxes and continue from where you stopped. Depending on how much they are, the average time it takes before harvest is six weeks.

However it is necessary that you carry out inspection visits.
Bee farming is a business that does not require that you own land as you can do the business on wastelands.
You do not need to feed bees as they scavenge on nectar and pollen. Some of the farm crops they pollinate also provide nectar for the bees.

Answered by Brian Ssenoga, bee farmer and CEO at MI-honey

Why should I scout my farmland?

Chris Bwire

Dear Chris
Crop scouting, which is also known as farm scouting, is a symbiotic relationship between a farmer and his or her crops. It is also the very basic action of moving through a crop field while making observations.
Crop scouting is done so that a farmer can see how different areas of his or her field are growing.
If there are problems during the growing season, you are advised to work to mitigate them so that those problems do not affect yield at harvest time.

Should problems go unnoticed or uncared for during the growing season, they can potentially limit the total yield, thus reducing the revenue from the sale of the crop or other intentions for the crop, such as livestock and poultry feed.
Answered by Apollo Mubiru an agribusiness agronomist .