Baguma: Model farmer with a successful agro-tourism approach

By training he is a civil engineer and by upbringing he is a farmer. David Baguma’s father made sure that he grew up around the farm to appreciate it as a source of livelihood. 

It is from farming that his father was able to support him through school until he attained the qualification to become a civil engineer. When young Baguma joined Senior One at Nyakasura School, he made sure he did not let his father down because he had sacrificed to give him an education he never had. 

His father dropped out of school in Primary One. Not to lose on academic success and picking farming knowledge from his father, Baguma would keenly utilise the holidays to learn from his father in aspiration of following in his footsteps. 

The old man always told him that it was shameful to buy food when he had the opportunity to grow it. 

How he started 

In 2008, Baguma bought land in Kyaninga, Kyakakere village in Rwengaju Sub-country.

He started preparing the land for farming and by coincidence, in the same year, President Museveni declared Rwengaju a model village.

“And he facilitated us with water for production. That was an opportunity for me to start serious farming. On December 15, 2011, I moved from Fort Portal City and started living here (Rwengaju),” he says.

He called it Njeru Guest Farm because with time, people started visiting to learn from the modern farming methods he was engaged in. Plus, he saw the traffic of foreign tourists visiting the crater lakes around the area so he adopted the idea of hosting them on the farm for a tour.

“It eventually became a business on its own. Visitors or tourists come to see our food chain and they pay us money to do so. That is called agro-tourism,” Rwengaju’s lead model farmer explains. 

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He adds that for one to qualify as a model farmer, one must have a good home with amenities such as a toilet and a generally hygienic. They must also have food of quality and in quantity (food security).
Income 

Another requirement for one to qualify as a model farmer, is the ability to have an income of Shs20m collectively per year, so a farmer should have something to sell per day, per month and in each season.

Baguma, earns between Shs60,000 and Shs100,000 per day. He sells averagely six pineapple per day, each at Shs2,500, amounting to a total of Shs15,000.

The other daily income is supplemented by sales from milk and poultry. He earns a monthly net income of Shs500,000 from his banana plantation. His seasonal income comes from the sale of vegetable gardens of Irish potatoes and onions. 

Expansion plan  
Overall, he purposed the farm as his retirement project. From the dairy section of the farm, he has 11 cows from which he is assured of 11 calves each year. 

His target is to expand the kraal to 20 cows so that he can double the calves and ultimately sell at least seven of them, each fetching an average of Shs3m which will amount to Shs21m per year from the cattle project.

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A heifer can attract up to Shs4m while a bull attracts a price of between Shs1.8m to Shs2m. Every first Tuesday of the month, farmers of Rwengaju village meet to analyse, benchmark, and advise each other on how to move forward in their respective agricultural endeavours. 

Animal feeds 
At Baguma’s farm, is a feeds processing system for cattle from Napier grass preserved by molasses. The grass is shredded using cottage machines. The grass feeds the farmer’s cows, and he sells to other farmers in need of feeds. 

“The government gave 150 heifers to farmers in this village, and they realised that they are producing every year and they did not have the pasture to feed the animals. That is where I saw an opportunity, so I got Napier grass. At times I put in maize and make silage for them at an affordable price,” the model farmer explains.
He also blends it with potato vines to make it protein rich. It is packed in drums and silage bunkers and heaps. He sells a 75-kilogramme drum at Shs12,000. 

Manure 
Cow dung ,  serves as manure and is also used to generate biogas which his family uses for cooking purposes.

“We came up with the idea of building a local biogas plant. One wheelbarrow of cow dung in the biogas system can produce gas for two hours. The biogas brought us another good opportunity. It gave us biogas slurry- the debris mix of cow dung water and worked on by bacteria. It is very good manure which we take to our gardens and plantations,” he says. 

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He adds that they mix the bio slurry with maize brand and salt to get feeds for his animals. On top of providing gas, he also earns cash from selling cow dung. 

Some of the slurry is buried in a pit with soil and leftovers from cow feed to make another form of powdered manure that is also used on the farm and sold.

He grows bananas on an acre. It is part of the farm projects fertilised using the biogas slurry.
That is in addition to pineapples, avocado and guava. “Those sell very well, and since they are well fertilised, the results are good. They are harvested all throughout,” the 59-year-old farmer further adds.

Grows vegetables offseason  
Njeru Guest Farm has a vegetable garden of two and a half acres. He plants them even when the season is dry, thanks to the irrigation system.

He supplies his vegetables when they are scarce in the market. The traditional dry season is in June, July then December, January, and February. 

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He profits from selling during the dry season. 
“A scenario last season, a bunch of a kilogramme of onion cost Shs500 and two months later when I produced mine, we were selling at between Shs5,000 and Shs7,000 for the same quantity, all because of that water for production,” says  Baguma.

Challenges 
The farming journey has been with its share of challenges, one being availability of genuine and affordable pesticides. 

His mitigation to that is usage of urine which he collects from a park in Fort Portal. The civil engineer built a urinal with a connected pipe that collects urine every day. 

The urine fertilises the soils and kill the pests in the gardens. He still grapples with ticks on the cows. Many of the drugs available do not kill the ticks.

The Rwengaju farmers tried using a drug called Dudu Accetelamycin which would kill the ticks but also affect the cattle as some of them went blind and subsequently died.

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Baguma says he lost two cows after using the Dudu Accetelamycin drug. For now, the farmers have resorted to working together because individually, they stand to be cheated as they have less bargaining power.

Many farmers have been cheated by middlemen who offer meagre prices for produce because they can negotiate with individual farmers. That is part of the reason he has halted plans to start a piggery. 

The farmer says there are many pigs on the market with less consumers. He explains that unlike in Kampala where there is a relatively high appetite for pork, the Batooro are not yet good consumers of pork.

“They still despise it, not like in places such as Buganda where pork is a sauce and popular delicacy. Here, it is not so the market is low. I know piggery can do well. For now, I have solved the feeds’ issue so I am doing research on how to succeed with piggery as a business,” Baguma says.

The farmer says that he is through with the responsibility of paying school fees and his children have chosen to offer extra hands and minds at the farm. 

“As a farmer, I am happy. I have pride and laugh every morning seeing my cows running around. People go to pay comedians to make them laugh. I laugh at no cost, he adds.

The other cost he does not incur, is having to go to the gym and do exercises. He walks around his farm every morning and evening; keeping fit while he earns a source of livelihood.

Solar energy 
The whole farm is powered by solar energy. The national hydroelectricity is yet to reach Rwengaju village. 
“Even if it comes, with my biogas for cooking and my solar for lighting and watching television, I might not use it much, after all paying it is a problem. We take weeks without going to the market. We only need sugar and salt for visitors. Farming is not a bad business. It is the challenges we face that need to be solved,” he says.

Plan
His target is to expand the kraal to 20 cows so that he can double the calves and ultimately sell at least seven of them, each fetching an average of Shs3m which will amount to Shs21m per year from the cattle project.