Gerald Ssendaula: A farmer of many faces

Mr Gerald Ssendaula, former minister of Finance, is a farmer of many faces. He is a large scale coffee farmer and the chairman of National Union of Coffee Agribusiness and Farm Enterprises (NUCAFE). One could, therefore easily mistake him to be just a large scale coffee farmer. But he is also a large-scale livestock farmer with two or three different ranches where he keeps hundreds of dairy cattle, beef cattle, goats, and pigs. 

Yet at Kaabagala near Kinoni Town, in Lwengo District, where he owns some 900 acres of land, he mainly grows annual crops, maize, tomatoes, water melon, cabbage, pumpkins, onions, green pepper, arrow yams, and a whole range of other annual crops.  Also on the same farm he has started planting cashew nut trees with a retirement plan in mind. 

“This is a crop that lasts several years and can yield nuts that I may sell even when I am too old for active crop farming,” he told Seeds of Gold.

He has a manager to oversee the activities on the farm but he always finds time to personally inspect all the farming activities there. 

“Some people smoke and others drink but for me farming is my addiction,” he says.  “It is something that was instilled in me as a child, right on that hill across the swamp,” Ssendaula says as he points to Kyoko village about three miles away, where he grew up under the care of his grandfather who was a coffee farmer.  

After his formal education as a young man he joined Barclays Bank where he served for many years, finally retiring at the position of general manager and going into farming.  

Mr Simon Lubega, a carpenter in nearby Kinoni Town on Masaka-Mbarara Highway told Seeds of Gold, “Ssendaula is a man with an amazing interest in farming. He was a large scale farmer before joining politics and he left politics to return to farming. He has many different non-agricultural investments but his real interest has always been farming. It is not even surprising that he easily gave up politics to continue farming.”

Concerned farmer
When Seeds of Gold visited his farm at Kaabagala, Ssendaula was inspecting his field of tomatoes. 

“I have a big concern about the pesticides and other agrochemicals imported into this country,” he said. “Please go and publish it in your newspaper that many of the pesticides on the market are fake and cannot kill the pests they are expected to kill. Their importation must be more carefully regulated by perhaps making all of them go thorough scrutiny and verification by a research organisation such as National Agricultural Research Organisation (Naro) before they are passed on to the farmers to use.”  

He complained about a pest that he was struggling to control on the farm with the use of traps that were advised by an agriculturist after the ‘fake pesticides’ had failed to kill the destructive pest.  

To an observer, however, the tomato field looks impressive and quite promising. Many tomatoes show signs of ripening and ready for harvest in perhaps a week’s time. He grows them in stages to ensure that he has tomatoes to sell on a regular basis. In one field measuring three acres, he plants tomato seedlings this month and then after one month he plants a new field and in another month a new field is planted.

So he has tomatoes for sale nearly all year round. This applies to almost all the other crops he grows on the farm. He has onions planted this month and others planted some three months ago which are now almost ready for harvesting.

Since his farm is located close to Kyoja Swamp he has an irrigation system that supplies water to all his crops in case the rains fail. 

“The reason I went into production of annual crops is to ensure cash flow,” he says. 

“Coffee can be harvested only once or twice in a year. It is not the kind of crop to rely on if you want to earn money on a weekly or daily basis.” 

Mixed farming
But this is the same man that also owns a dairy cattle farm in Rakai District which produces milk every day. His methods of work are a good demonstration of the main advantage of mixed farming; if the sell price of one item goes down during a particular period another item’s price is good. The farmer does not have to worry so much about fluctuating prices. Ssendaula’s method of fighting poverty through farming is avoiding putting all his eggs in one basket.      

He said that he has never been short of customers for his products. “Some of them are market women from Kinoni and others are from elsewhere,” he said.

When you think of it, his products are the items mainly found on market stalls and grocery stores nearly everywhere; onions, green pepper, yams, tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelon, and cabbages etc.  In the last harvest season he harvested more than 800 tonnes of maize which he easily sold off to a flour making company.

He has his own nursery where he prepares all the seedlings of the crops that he grows. And what is so remarkable is the strictness he attaches to order; all crops are planted in straight lines. 

“It is important to have everything on the farm well arranged,” he says. “There should be enough space for the farmer to walk in doing crop inspection or applying fertiliser or pesticides.” 

By planting crops in lines the farmer has a quick idea how much to harvest. He can for example count the onion stems he has on one line and multiply by the number of lines which may give him an estimate of how much he expects to harvest and the likely income

His Kaabagala Farm employs some 15 regular employees but the number of workers grows higher during harvest time of many of the crops. 

Another thing to learn about Ssendaula is that despite his many achievements in life he does not accept that he has already won the battle against poverty. 

At the age of 76, he still has big plans for making more money; setting up another petrol station somewhere, constructing cottages for a holiday resort on his Kaabagala Farm, opening up new restaurants here and there in Kampala and elsewhere, and so on and so forth.

Diverse  
The retired politician owns a square mile of land at Kabale Village in Rakai District where he keeps Friesian cows and also grows Robusta coffee, bananas, and other crops.

He further owns two square miles at Matalama in Ndagwe Sub-county.