Reap big on a small piece of land

Certain agricultural activities, which may be lucrative, do not necessarily need large pieces of land. One such activity is the preparation of seedlings for sale to farmers.
For some years now, John Mugera of Nabulago village in Kabonera Sub-county, Masaka District, has been selling grafted mango and orange seedlings to farmers. He says it is a business that people with small land holdings can engage in to earn income and improve their livelihoods.

Sought after
“A lot of farmers need good planting material and are ready to pay money to get it,” he observes. “To tap this money, smallholder farmers can acquire the needed skills and become producers of the seedlings. The trick is to ensure that the seedlings have desirable characteristics such as early maturity, high yields, disease resistance, drought tolerance and other attributes.”
He grows mangoes and oranges on his farm, which serves as a mother garden. His mango fruits are huge and very sweet, which makes them much sought after.

Fuse and grow
“The botanical name for this type of mangos is Ngowen. They are quite big and they have a small seed, which means they have a lot of sweet and juicy material to bite off,” he explains.
Mugera gets scions (stems or small branches) from the Ngowen mango tree in the garden and unites them with the root stocks of other mango varieties.
This process is known as grafting. It is achieved by tying the two ends together for about four or five weeks. During this time they fuse together and continue to grow as a single seedling for future planting.

Using a small space
He pots hundreds of seedlings made through grafting, which are usually ready for selling to farmers after about three months of hardening following fusion of root stock and scion.

“They are prepared under shade and the soil in the polythene [wrap] should be fertile and free of any weed seeds. The seedlings under preparation have to be frequently watered by the farmer, usually in the morning or in the evening.”
Mugera sells each Ngowen mango seedling at Shs5,000. He also produces grafted seedlings of other types of mangoes including Kait, Billy, Kent, Bolibo Zireti and Apple Mango. There are also grafted seedlings for citruses: Oranges, tangerine and lemons.

The orange varieties include Valencia, Washington, Hamline and Washington-Navy. Each seedling is at Shs3,000.
“This is a form of business anybody with a small piece of land can engage in. My nursery bed area measures just a few square metres. What the farmer needs is to get hundreds of mango seeds to plant in a relatively small area of even as little as half an acre to get a mother garden for producing the stems and small branches,” he adds.
There are several advantages for farmers planting grafted fruit trees. By grafting, a farmer may grow two or more varieties of mangoes on the same tree.

Desirable traits
One tree may have some branches producing oranges while the other branches produce tangerines. “Grafting makes it possible to change the top of a mango tree from being undesirable and make it desirable,” Mugera points out as an example.

He adds that the grafted seedlings tend to fruit in less time than those obtained by seed germination.
There is a big demand these days for fruits such as mangoes and oranges. And where a farmer does not have the needed space for growing the fruits, he or she should engage in production of seedlings.
“Some NGOs and other such clients, who make large purchases, often place orders for the seedlings to pass on to the farmers to grow,” he notes.