His newsroom career supported his farm ambition

Ssali and his wife, Mary, harvest coffee. PHOTO BY ALI MAMBULE

What you need to know:

As a journalist, he covered many successful farmers, and this inspired him to invest in farming.

He identified a number of coffee trees on his 10-acre garden, which are resistant to the devastating Coffee Wilt Disease (CWD) and he is now replacing the ones which are infected by the disease with the CWD-resistant varieties.
Michael J. Ssali,or MJ as he is known by his peers, is a farmer in Lwengo District as well as a journalist who writes in in Daily Monitor and has a column on farming in the Seeds of Gold magazine .

Whenever he went to interview farmers for his articles, his ambition to become a successful farmer grew. That is how he managed to transform his life and became exemplary in his village.
Ssali, a resident of Manja village, Kisekka Sub-county in Lwengo District, does not buy coffee seedlings to restock his coffee field, rather he learnt the skills of developing coffee cuttings from his own garden.

Fairly comfortable
“My wife Mary and I have been coffee farmers for nearly 20 years, which has helped us to live a fairly comfortable life. We have been able to pay school fees for our children and we stay in a better house than we used to do long ago,” he says.
“Education is expensive and we still have challenges since nearly all our children have pursued medical courses, which require a lot of money, but we are quite confident that we will overcome the challenges if we continue working hard as coffee farmers.”

If one was to visit unannounced, he would most likely find Ssali and his wife in the farm carrying out different activities like pruning, harvesting or weeding.
“We sometimes hire casual labourers to help us in harvesting especially during the peak seasons from April to June and November to December in order to avoid thieves who steal coffee at night,” Ssali explains.
Until 1996, Ssali kept cattle, goats, and pigs and he also grew bananas.

He narrates: “I would attend farmers meetings and listen to their stories. Later ,I found myself writing agricultural stories for Daily Monitor out of those meetings. One day, in 1996, I paid a visit to the farm of former minister of Finance Gerald Ssendaula, at Kabagala Village, Kisekka Sub-county in Lwengo District.
I got attracted to his coffee plantation, which was doing very well. He was growing clonal coffee and I resolved to begin growing clonal coffee too. Fortunately, I was able to buy 650 clonal coffee seedlings from him on credit, which I planted the following rainy season.”

In the following year, 1997, Ssali was offered a three-week-trip to US under the International Visitors Programme sponsored by the US government.
“We were given a generous allowance in dollars and at the end of my trip I had saved Shs1.8m, which I used to buy another 3,500 clonal coffee seedlings to expand my coffee plantation. Due to its high yields ,I began harvesting it in 2000.”

Best practices
Ssali applies both organic and artificial fertilisers. These include animal droppings, NPK, Urea, CAN, Super-gro and others which aid the high yields.
“There is no way a farmer can gain from his garden without investing in it. Gone are the days when our grand and great grandparents used to plant crops and left everything to God. Today, one must keep his or her feet and hands in the garden to make it productive,” he points out.

He maintains the recommended distance from one coffee plant to another to allow proper application of fertilisers.
Although Ssali has been in coffee farming for a long time, as a journalist, he reads a lot about agriculture to acquire more information regarding coffee and other crops.
He spends time and other resources to attend workshops and farmers’ seminars aimed at improving coffee production.

Market
He always keeps his dry coffee in stores until when the market price is good. That is when he takes it for processing and then sells it off. The coffee price, according to Ssali, has generally not been bad.

Challenges
Whereas coffee farmers countrywide decry the coffee wilt disease and the black twig borer, which have destroyed their crops, Ssali has managed to keep his garden less infected. He keeps it free from weeds, removing every infected plant and burning it immediately.
He has also noted an increasing number of thefts on his farm. The thieves steal his coffee while it is still on the trees.
To find a solution, he has hired private watchmen who scare them off during day and night.
He, however, has not identified any solution for the long dry spells apart from digging trenches that keep the soil moist for some time.