The big potential of small farms

The majority of farmers in Uganda are smallholders working on between one and two hectares.

For most of them, the farms are the source of the food they eat and the cash they use to buy clothes, to pay hospital fees and school fees, and other needs.

It is also true that a big percentage of people in formal employment in urban centres were born in farming households.

Many of them own land in the countryside where they travel on weekends to engage in some form of agricultural activities with a view to earn some extra income and to prepare for a soft landing as farmers when they retire from formal employment.

They might be successful lawyers, doctors, accountants or whatever other professionals, but a lot of them had their education paid for by their parents who worked hard on small farms.

How then do we make the Ugandan smallholder farmer more productive in order to meet the surging population’s food demand and to speed up poverty reduction?

Why do farmers in the so-called developed countries harvest more from one hectare, one cow, and one hen than we do here in Uganda? The answer to such questions could lie in the kind of seeds that we plant, the way we manage our soil especially in times of unpredictable weather patterns triggered by climate change, the amount of technical advice available to us, easy access to cheap credit, and rewarding markets for our farm products.

Our farmers need renewed agricultural extension services to learn about the advantages of planting improved seeds, application of fertilizers, soil conservation, pest control, as well as irrigation and other climate smart agricultural technologies.

The farmers further need guidance on how to carry out sustainable commercial farming on small pieces of land. For poultry farmers operating near a reliable water source, it is possible, for example, to keep as many as fifteen thousand or more layers on just an acre.
Some farmers can keep hundreds of beehives on just half an acre of land. Smallholder farmers must also be assisted to get full ownership of the land that they occupy.

Mr Michael Ssali is a veteran journalist,
[email protected]