By our reporter
Kampala -Government through the Ministry of Agriculture Animal industries and fisheries has handed over 25 medium sized 75 HP tractors and their accessories to select large scale commercial farmers and groups from across the country.
This is meant to help them try and catch up with the planting seasons.
According to Agriculture Minister Frank Tumwebaze, for the last two years, government policy and strategy has been to focus on increasing production horizontally first.
He says horizontal expansion of production means opening of more available arable unutilized land and putting it under effective production.
Through Government Agencies like the National Agricultural advisory Services (NAADS), the Ministry of Agriculture started identifying and profiling these large scale farmers/farming entities per district and has created a data bank.
Minister Tumwebaze says they decided to support the large scale farming entities because they have big land, will help to produce extensively the much needed crops for food and animal feed security.
“The small holder farmers need affordable animal feeds (poultry, pigs, fish etc) yet they can’t produce them because of their land size limitations,” he said
The minister also says large scale commercial farmers are able to produce and develop the whole enterprise value chain on farm and so they become centers of aggregation and sustainable market for the small holder farmers around their nucleus farms.
The nucleus farms also do act as learning/knowledge transfer centers for small holder or start-up farmers.
Speaking at the hand over ceremony minister Tumwebaze says modernisation of agriculture can’t be complete without adoption of precision farming technologies (irrigation, correct fertiliser usage, proper harvest and post harvest handling as well as storage among others.
He says the large scale farming centers will be the vanguard of this adoption.
