More Fun Farmer Activities in Serere

By Sara:

I continue enjoying meeting with the farmer group in Serere and studying the Bible together with them. We have done a lot of interesting agriculture lessons together, including one about caring for our animals well.  I learned how to make homemade salt licks for livestock from an ECHO publication and they said that would be useful to them, so we did it together.  Grinding dry eggshells, one of the ingredients:

Mixing everything together (some people didn't want to get their hands dirty and used a plastic bag):

The final products, before they are dried:

One woman went home and made her own salt block after her meeting.  She brought it to show to all of us the next time we met.  It was very professionally done!

Another time, we tested seed germination rates.  Everyone brought in some of the seeds they are going to plant next season to see how well they have been stored and help them know how heavily/lightly they should plant those seeds.  The next time we met, people reported on the germination rate they got.

I also tested some of my seeds that had gotten infested with pests to see how bad they were, and they had a very low germination rate - only 30%!  Everyone else's seeds did much better, more like 70-90%.