Uwepo Farm Tour

By Sara:

Thanks to a generous gift from one of our supporting churches, I have been able to take groups of farmers on learning visits to different places.  In early March, I led another such visit.  I brought the Magoro farmer group to Uwepo, an organization and teaching farm in Jinja.  The farmers in Magoro have shown their enthusiasm for learning and willingness to contribute to further educational opportunities, so it was a great opportunity for them to get exposure to more new ideas.

Since Jinja is very far from Magoro, the group traveled by bus part of the way on the day before the tour.  They spent the night at a church.  The next morning, they left at 5:30am in order to get to the Uwepo farm before 9am!  The Uwepo staff were so impressed by the group's timeliness.  

I really appreciate the work that Uwepo is doing in educating farmers and in propagating unique varieties of plants.  We ate breakfast at the farm and one of the items in our breakfast was breadfruit chips.  Breadfruit is a tropical tree which produces starchy fruits that can be eaten like cassava or potato.  One tree can live 80 years and can give up to 250 kilos of fruit in a year!  This is a great investment since it allows the farmer to passively get a lot of food, without a lot of intensive labor.

Although it poured while we were eating breakfast, the rain stopped in time for the tour to proceed.  There were lessons on grafting:

We got to see examples of vegetable growing, mixed with trees:

Everyone got to do some hands-on activities with preparing food for black soldier flies and learning how to raise them (even me):

We saw how the farm is raising chickens and learned about new things to feed them: 

At the end of the tour, we went to the nursery where Uwepo sells many varieties of plants.  The group found lots of trees they wanted to take home to their gardens.  Even the driver of the bus bought a seedling for himself!  And although the breadfruit seedlings are expensive, compared to other tree seedlings (due to the difficulties in propagating it), five people bought seedlings and were excited to go plant them at their homes.