Today we went to do some farm research near Kangulumira. We
stopped at the clinic first to drop off Sophia so she can do some home-visits
with Barbara. Then Israel, Henri and I drove about 5 minutes out of town to
visit a pineapple-drying farm. I met the owner, Muhamad Abas, and was
introduced by Israel. He explained that he would be interpreting the conversation
for us and also that Henri would be helping. I introduced myself in Luganda and
Muhamad seemed quite surprised and happy. He asked how long I have been here
for and Israel said “days” and that made Muhamad surprised. We began our
interview and the transcribed interview is below.
To summarize the interview, we spoke mostly about his
operational limitations with his organic certification and just the basics of
how he ran his farm. His biggest limitation was that he needed a certification
to be recognized as organic and to be able to export his products to the EU. He
currently cannot afford the certification and said the fee was 50,000,000
Uganda shillings. At the current exchange rate of 2,400 to the dollar that
would be about US $20,000 which seems insanely outrageous to me. I am currently
doing some research to find out the validity of this number. He said another
organization has the certification and therefor he sells to them at a low price
and they in turn export the products to the EU at 10X’s the rate that they buy
them from Muhamad for.
We also spoke of these daily operations. He has 30
employees, mostly women, who work for about 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. They
get paid 2,000 shillings per day which is about a dollar day which I believe is
about the national average. He sells a kilo of the dried pineapple for 8,000
shillings and can produce 30 kilos per day. At that rate he can make 29,000
shillings per day in product ($1,000). This is his revenue, not profit as he
buys the pineapple from local growers. He does have a small farm in which he
grows pineapple but he buys most of it from the farmers.
Israel and I spoke of how this operation could be
transformed into our business plan. We noted that if we are able to secure a
certification, we can use that for all the products growing on the farm. We
will do some research and try to see how much it costs and add it to the plan.
Since Muhamad buys the pineapple from other farmers, we can make the process
more efficient by growing the pineapple ourselves. We would plot out the acres
of the farms to farmers who would receive the land for free, and they would
grow their certain crop in their plot.
We left the farm and thanked Muhamad. He left us with a
smile and gave us each a huge handful of the pineapple. We thanked him and
headed to Henri’s family’s farm. We went to see what his farm looked like and
what ours could possibly look like. His farm is very large, probably over 10
acres. The land is his fathers, passed on from his father and is plotted out to
him and his brother. They grow pineapple, mango, sugar cane, coffee and other
fruit on the land. During our walk Israel and Henri were speaking in Luganda
and I rarely was able to understand the conversation. I did ask some questions
as we walk and found out the following from Israel per personal communication:
Pineapple
can grow in cycles of 7 years. After 7 years is up the nutrients are unable to
support the growth and one needs to grow another crop on that land. I asked him
if the market for pineapples get saturated because it seems like most everyone
grows pineapple and wondered if there were so many that the prices were being
driven down. He said that pineapple was so popular and it was used every day
that the prices still stayed high enough to farm. I told Israel about shade
grown coffee and he had never heard of it. I told him that shade grown is known
to be the best 1% of coffee grown in the world and demands a high price. He
wants to know how it is grown because he believes it will just grow very high
as it will reach for the sun and not become bushy and produce well.
