(I have edited this reply for clarity and to add a little context):
First, let’s assume sugarcane brings farmers more income than sorghum. Even then, diversifying with crops like sorghum is still very essential, because our region Busoga, presently, is known for only one thing (sugarcane), and is currently the biggest sugarcane producing region in Uganda.
Sugarcane has been blamed for severe hunger and malnutrition in our region. Sorghum on the other hand, can be eaten as food (unlike sugarcane), and being a drought-resistant crop, it is one of those crops that could contribute greatly to food security in a region like ours where droughts have become very frequent.
Moreover, a 2021 news report by Uganda’s The Independent said “for Busoga to get out of the current poverty cycle, there will be need to diversify and find new crops for farmers other than the whole region cultivating one perennial crop.” And since the main challenge rural farmers in our region face is the absence of reliable markets, a grain facility like the one we intend to install is the very kind of thing that would help these farmers diversify their crops/incomes.
Now the answers to the questions you asked, Roddy:
1). With a yield of around 40 tons/acre, even using the lowest price Ugx 60,000/ton would give an annual revenue of Ugx 2.4m/acre. For your estimates for sorghum of Ugx 1,300/kg and 700kg/acre with 2 harvests/year, that would only be Ugx 1.82m/acre. Is there some thing I’m missing?
Sugarcane takes two years to mature, and is harvested once in a 24-month cycle. During the same period, a sorghum farmer harvests four times. This way, sorghum may be a better choice.
The other thing with sugarcane is that it is almost exclusively bought by only one category of buyers (sugarcane millers). As a result, whenever it drops to the levels of Ugx 60,000 per ton, it isn’t just that farmers suffer a low price. It is that they also often have no buyers (due to oversupply), which is why they then resort to selling it as firewood, or for as little as Ugx 30,000 ($8) for a full Tata truck that has ~10 tons (as said in this facebook post).
By contrast, sorghum has a relatively wider market (all breweries; relief agencies, animal feed producers etc). The UN’s World Food Program alone, which is currently the biggest buyer of grains in Africa, sources sorghum and other crops from 15+ countries, including Uganda (see page 3 of this PDF) -- and buying from smallholder farmers is one of their priorities.
2). About the benefits of the facility versus the current setup of growing sorghum without a plant: do you have an estimate for how much sorghum Uganda Breweries and other companies would be willing to buy in the current setup? That is, how many farmers/acres could you support without the plant?
Uganda Breweries (UBL) has no limit on the number of farmers that they are willing to buy from (or the volume of sorghum they are willing to buy from them) without a plant. However, of all the institutional buyers of grains in Uganda today, UBL is probably the only buyer who is willing to buy our farmers’ sorghum under this setup.
Putting UBL aside, the other big buyers of grains in Uganda (and in Africa) are relief agencies like the WFP, GOAL, UNHCR, USAID, World Vision etc who provide emergency food assistance in refugee camps, hospitals, schools etc. However, because of things like aflatoxins (which are said to be present in 75% of Uganda’s grains), all of these agencies have strict guidelines for buying grains like maize and sorghum, and do not buy from food suppliers who do not have their own established postharvest handling and cleaning facilities.
But it isn’t just relief agencies. A few weeks ago, we contacted Nile Breweries to ask if they too could start buying our farmers sorghum, since Nile is located in our region of Busoga (in Jinja), yet UBL (our current buyer) is in Kampala. We haven’t received a final answer yet. However, when you do some research, the fact is: Nile, unlike UBL, requires their grain suppliers to have their own grain cleaning/storage facilities before they can supply them.
A farmer named Ruth from Soroti (in a distant part of eastern Uganda outside of Busoga) who currently owns a grain cleaning and storage facility that was also installed by Alvan Blanch, says in this news article that… “I told [Nile] if I could be one of their suppliers of white sorghum. They welcomed the idea [but] they told me I had to have a warehouse as well as a machine capable of cleaning the sorghum”.
This means: the only big buyer we can work with under our current setup is UBL and no one else. The other thing? Under this setup, expanding our sorghum project to reach a big number of farmers would be very hard, because even our capacity for handling their produce will be limited.
Above all, handling large volumes of sorghum without any postharvest systems is prone to aflatoxin contamination (a common reason for which Uganda’s grain produce is often rejected.
3). A separate question: could you give me an idea of what proportion of farmers in Busoga grow sugarcane versus being subsistence farmers?
First, the number of farmers here in Busoga who only own <3 acres of land are the majority, as The Monitor says here (subscription required). As such, smallholder farmers, who mostly engage in subsistence agriculture, also form the biggest number of sugarcane growers.
It is why Uganda’s president recently urged small farmers in Busoga to leave sugarcane, because they (small farmers) are the majority, and when people talk of sugarcane (and the misery it has unraveled) in Busoga, they are often referring to these rural smallholder farmers—although there is also a small number of farmers who own large pieces of land, and who are the ones who have at least managed to benefit from sugarcane growing.
(I have edited this reply for clarity and to add a little context):
First, let’s assume sugarcane brings farmers more income than sorghum. Even then, diversifying with crops like sorghum is still very essential, because our region Busoga, presently, is known for only one thing (sugarcane), and is currently the biggest sugarcane producing region in Uganda.
Sugarcane has been blamed for severe hunger and malnutrition in our region. Sorghum on the other hand, can be eaten as food (unlike sugarcane), and being a drought-resistant crop, it is one of those crops that could contribute greatly to food security in a region like ours where droughts have become very frequent.
Moreover, a 2021 news report by Uganda’s The Independent said “for Busoga to get out of the current poverty cycle, there will be need to diversify and find new crops for farmers other than the whole region cultivating one perennial crop.” And since the main challenge rural farmers in our region face is the absence of reliable markets, a grain facility like the one we intend to install is the very kind of thing that would help these farmers diversify their crops/incomes.
Now the answers to the questions you asked, Roddy:
1). With a yield of around 40 tons/acre, even using the lowest price Ugx 60,000/ton would give an annual revenue of Ugx 2.4m/acre. For your estimates for sorghum of Ugx 1,300/kg and 700kg/acre with 2 harvests/year, that would only be Ugx 1.82m/acre. Is there some thing I’m missing?
Sugarcane takes two years to mature, and is harvested once in a 24-month cycle. During the same period, a sorghum farmer harvests four times. This way, sorghum may be a better choice.
The other thing with sugarcane is that it is almost exclusively bought by only one category of buyers (sugarcane millers). As a result, whenever it drops to the levels of Ugx 60,000 per ton, it isn’t just that farmers suffer a low price. It is that they also often have no buyers (due to oversupply), which is why they then resort to selling it as firewood, or for as little as Ugx 30,000 ($8) for a full Tata truck that has ~10 tons (as said in this facebook post).
By contrast, sorghum has a relatively wider market (all breweries; relief agencies, animal feed producers etc). The UN’s World Food Program alone, which is currently the biggest buyer of grains in Africa, sources sorghum and other crops from 15+ countries, including Uganda (see page 3 of this PDF) -- and buying from smallholder farmers is one of their priorities.
2). About the benefits of the facility versus the current setup of growing sorghum without a plant: do you have an estimate for how much sorghum Uganda Breweries and other companies would be willing to buy in the current setup? That is, how many farmers/acres could you support without the plant?
Uganda Breweries (UBL) has no limit on the number of farmers that they are willing to buy from (or the volume of sorghum they are willing to buy from them) without a plant. However, of all the institutional buyers of grains in Uganda today, UBL is probably the only buyer who is willing to buy our farmers’ sorghum under this setup.
Putting UBL aside, the other big buyers of grains in Uganda (and in Africa) are relief agencies like the WFP, GOAL, UNHCR, USAID, World Vision etc who provide emergency food assistance in refugee camps, hospitals, schools etc. However, because of things like aflatoxins (which are said to be present in 75% of Uganda’s grains), all of these agencies have strict guidelines for buying grains like maize and sorghum, and do not buy from food suppliers who do not have their own established postharvest handling and cleaning facilities.
But it isn’t just relief agencies. A few weeks ago, we contacted Nile Breweries to ask if they too could start buying our farmers sorghum, since Nile is located in our region of Busoga (in Jinja), yet UBL (our current buyer) is in Kampala. We haven’t received a final answer yet. However, when you do some research, the fact is: Nile, unlike UBL, requires their grain suppliers to have their own grain cleaning/storage facilities before they can supply them.
A farmer named Ruth from Soroti (in a distant part of eastern Uganda outside of Busoga) who currently owns a grain cleaning and storage facility that was also installed by Alvan Blanch, says in this news article that… “I told [Nile] if I could be one of their suppliers of white sorghum. They welcomed the idea [but] they told me I had to have a warehouse as well as a machine capable of cleaning the sorghum”.
This means: the only big buyer we can work with under our current setup is UBL and no one else. The other thing? Under this setup, expanding our sorghum project to reach a big number of farmers would be very hard, because even our capacity for handling their produce will be limited.
Above all, handling large volumes of sorghum without any postharvest systems is prone to aflatoxin contamination (a common reason for which Uganda’s grain produce is often rejected.
3). A separate question: could you give me an idea of what proportion of farmers in Busoga grow sugarcane versus being subsistence farmers?
First, the number of farmers here in Busoga who only own <3 acres of land are the majority, as The Monitor says here (subscription required). As such, smallholder farmers, who mostly engage in subsistence agriculture, also form the biggest number of sugarcane growers.
It is why Uganda’s president recently urged small farmers in Busoga to leave sugarcane, because they (small farmers) are the majority, and when people talk of sugarcane (and the misery it has unraveled) in Busoga, they are often referring to these rural smallholder farmers—although there is also a small number of farmers who own large pieces of land, and who are the ones who have at least managed to benefit from sugarcane growing.