Goat keeping is an easy way of getting organic manure for small scale farmers. PHOTO | MICHAEL J SSALI.
In most developed countries only about five percent of the population is engaged in farming. Yet in most underdeveloped countries such as those in sub-Saharan Africa about 70 percent of the population practice farming and entirely depend on it for both food and income.
Most of the farmers occupy small pieces of land measuring less than four acres on which they carry out mixed farming --- keep some livestock and grow some crops. In many cases cultural norms influence what kind of livestock to keep regardless of the economic returns.
Pigs are not kept in Muslim communities and sheep and fish are not reared in other communities because, according to them, it is taboo to eat them. The farmers mostly use simple tools such as hand hoes and pangas. Computerised combine harvesters and other heavy agricultural machines are unheard of for most of our smallholder farmers yet they are the key drivers of farming in the industrialised countries.
Polygamy is a common practice and family planning is not emphasised. It is quite common for one man to produce many children. It is always a struggle to feed the children well and to provide for their other needs such as clothing and school dues. School drop-out rates now standing at 45 percent in primary schools are growing despite provision of universal primary education. About 28 percent of girls in rural areas drop out of school often due to factors such as poverty, early marriage and limited access to sanitary facilities. Boys’ school drop-out is mainly fuelled by domestic work, peer pressure, and lack of family support. (Wikipedia). The rates are simply unacceptable.
Crop and livestock production
Crop and livestock production on the small pieces of land is expected to cater for the feeding needs of the large families and provision of income to purchase items like sauce pans, clothes, simple furniture, bicycles or motorcycles, water tanks, and housing improvement.
There is hardly enough money spared to spend on farm inputs like fertilisers and pesticides. And it is rare for such farmers to take their children to good private schools or to afford quality medical care. Well maintained farms of 10 or more acres are quite few and far between. Many large families engaged in small-scale agriculture still share housing with goats, chicken, and harvested crops. Most of them don’t have enough space for storing their harvests, let alone clean drying ground.
Peter Bamwesigye, Lwengo District principal agriculture officer, admits that large families are difficult to sustain on small farms but he says they can be helped to increase crop and livestock production if they adapt the new technologies of production and also use motorised machines.
“We encourage them to plant improved seeds that are bred to be high yielding, and drought tolerant,” he told Seeds of Gold on phone. “We tell them to carry out modern farming practices like drip irrigation, and to apply fertilisers. For some activities like maize harvesting there are machines which can pluck thousands of kilogrammes of grain from combs in just one day.”
Bamwesigye is also aware of some traditional inheritance practices which subdivide land among the children and their mothers when the head of the household dies. Since the piece of land is already small subdividing it further results in bigger farming challenges.
When the new owners take over the smaller pieces they tend to overwork the soil, which depletes it and reduces its capacity to support gainful crop growth. Poverty, hunger, and malnourishment, increases as food production reduces.
Gerald Ssendawula, a prominent farmer and former minister of Finance, says, “It is now the time for all people to embrace the wisdom of producing the number of children that they can support. The notion of free primary education for all children should not blind anybody to other requirements such as clothing, health care, and good feeding for the children, which are core responsibilities for the parents.”
He said that before his retirement from politics he had written a document recommending a maximum of four children for every family and he is not sure why his idea was never carried forward.
Subdividing farms
Ssendawula is also vehemently opposed to the idea of subdividing farms among the children when the head of the family dies. “The farm should be the property of the husband and wife who are expected to provide good professional training to their children in various fields so that they can be self-reliant,” he says.
“When the husband dies, ownership and management of the farm should go to the wife or just one of the children chosen as the heir. Land fragmentation is not good for the future of agriculture. The size of the farm should remain the same or even made larger.”
He admires some cultures in western Uganda where people put up several houses on one compound where all children regularly go and spend time looking after their animals without dividing up their farms.
Our failure to emphasise family planning as part of our economic development efforts has resulted in cutting down natural forests and destruction of wetlands for human settlement and farming. Necessity knows no law, goes the old saying. For as long as people have nowhere to live they will occupy any space that is available.
They are food insecure if they have the food but cannot cook it due to lack of fire wood, which is one of the reasons trees are cut down. Yet destruction of forests, trees, and wetlands only aggravates climate change's negative impacts. Government poverty alleviation intervention programmes such as Parish Development Model or Emyoga should seriously examine whether a small scale farmer with two or three wives and tens of children can put the allocated money to profitable use and really get out of poverty.
However, writing in the online newsletter Genetic Literacy Project on January 30, 2025, Prof William Moseley, director of the Food, Agriculture and Society Programme at Macalester College, said Africa needs to reject commercial agriculture and embrace small farms if it hopes to address food insecurity and poverty.
His main argument is that modern crop science or agronomy was developed in Europe to serve colonial interests. “The goal was to produce crops that would benefit European economies,” he wrote. He refers to it as intellectual colonisation in agronomic sciences.
In nearly every farming household there is space reserved for crops such as coffee, cotton, cocoa, and sunflower whose prices are determined by other people overseas. In many cases they are grown to attract income but they often take up space that would have been devoted to food production and reduction of malnutrition, which is a big health burden.
The use of heavy machines such as tractors on large farms involves the use of diesel which is a fossil fuel and producer of carbon dioxide, which is a global warming gas.
