School dropout picks money from onions

Some two-and-a-half kilometres from Okuda Trading Centre on the Soroti – Katakwi highway, one finds a meandering murram road that leads to the home of Francis Okiror.

The skies are clear and the sun is shining bright when the Seeds of Gold team arrives at Okiror’s farm of luscious vegetables.

After completing his Senior Six at Katakwi High School in 2019, 22-year-old Okiror had no hope of joining a tertiary institution because of the financial constraints faced by his parents.

The Covid-19 pandemic has handed many people lessons and the optimists such as Okiror are making lemonades out of them.

At the farm

He is busy in his garden when we arrive.  “This is where I spend most of my time since we closed in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I decided to lock myself down here,” says Okiror.

“Farming has been my passion since I was in high school, but this disease has given me the chance to do what I love without much distraction,” he adds.

Okiror grows his onions on one acre of land. “I cultivate onions on one acre and the other one hosts rice.”

He started the project in 2019, soon after completing high school.

“My parents financed me through a soft loan to set up the first garden from where I cultivated tomatoes,” he explains.

The money enabled him to set up a nursery bed, an irrigation system and labour costs.

The tomatoes did quite well, making him to plough back the profit into the business and last year, he set up his onion and rice gardens using profits from the venture.

Worked perfectly

He settled on this enterprise after visiting a Seeds of Gold Farm Clinic. He later enrolled in an online programme where he learnt more about crop husbandry and agro-marketing.

“But still I sought advice from a crop expert on the best onion variety to plant in my garden and did soil testing,” says Okiror, who established a seedbed, nurtured the seedlings and transplanted them into the garden after four weeks.

A day before transplanting, the onion seedlings must be hardened by gradually reducing frequency of watering, and planted at a rectangular spacing of 60 by 15cm along the drip lines.

He currently grows Jambar F1, Red passionF1, and Bombay red and Red pinoy onion varieties.

According to him, onions sell the most in major towns of eastern Uganda and are exported to Kenya and Sudan.

“If well-nurtured, onions take at most two months to mature and harvesting starts after 70 days,” says Okiror, who has vowed to enrol at university for a science course when schools reopen, using proceeds from the farm.

Breakthrough

“And with bulb onions, you can harvest, cure and store them for up to six months if prices in the market are not good,” says Okiror, noting that curing of onion is very important. For a good harvest, the 22-year-old says he goes for hybrid seeds.

“I then prepare a nursery bed, add manure and plant the seeds. Onion seeds are very tiny, therefore, they should be planted shallowly. I later transfer the seedlings after a month to an already tilled farm for planting,” he says.

Okiror reveals that his turning point came in 2020 when he made Shs65m. He sold four and half tonnes of onions to Sudanese businessmen.

 “I had never seen such money in my life. The Sudanese paid cash and that’s how everything around me changed,” he says.

How to raise onions

Okiror says to grow onions, one has to raise the seedlings from the nursery bed for a period of two to three months, though others only do it for a period of 45 days.

He adds that the nursery bed should have a proper shade to avoid direct sunshine as the tender leafy plants are delicate for too much sunshine.

While in the nursery bed, Okiror explains that the seedlings should always be weed free, with adequate water for proper growth sprinkled as a farmer awaits the seedlings to reach two month or 45 days for them to be ready for transplanting.

When transplanting, the 22-year- old says having the onion seedlings planted on contours is better as it controls soil erosion from taking place.

While in the mother bed, Okiror says it takes only two months for the onions to be ready to be marketed to the consumers.

Praises from trainer

Mr Joseph Opul, the director of Quality Education Consultancy Limited, says the feats that Okiror has registered have humbled him, adding that vegetable growing especially onions are paying.

“Later when this boy harvested his first onions in 2020, which got him that lot, he personally told me, that he never imagined after S6 that his parents would be able to find fees for higher education, but now with the money he has made with help of his parents, he will be able to enrol,” Mr Opul says.

He adds that Okiror is now training other youth to embrace onion farming.

Tips on growing onions

• Onions grow well in well-drained, fertile, sandy loam, non-compacted soils.

• The ideal pH is 5.8 to 6.8. Onion farming is a good venture since it’s possible to grow them throughout the year with irrigation.

• An acre requires 1-1.5kg of seeds, depending on variety and spacing.

• The spacing normally affects the size of the bulb onions.

• Just like other vegetables planted on nursery bed, site selection is key to proper planning for production.