Why cooperative societies are very important for every farmer

Immaculate Mayanja attends to one of her cows. PHOTO BY MICHAEL J. SSALI 

Immaculate Mayanja of Kyabbogo village, Kingo Sub-county is the manager of Kingo Farmers’ Cooperative Society in Lwengo District. It has a membership of 80 households engaged in livestock keeping, crop production and value addition.

“A major advantage is that as a cooperative society, it is easier for us to invite agriculture experts to provide us with training,” she notes.

“When they come they find all of us together in one place and give us lessons on such issues as crop diseases and how to fight them.”

As coffee farmers, they have been able to get training in quality improvement practices, from organisations such as Nucafe (National Union of Coffee and Agribusiness Farmers Enterprise) of which we are members.

Joint training
They have been taught that a coffee farmer must first choose the best seedlings, plant the crop with the right spacing, use manure where appropriate, prune the trees properly, pick only ripe coffee, dry it thoroughly on cement floors, mats, or tarpaulin, and to sell it in bulk as a cooperative society.

They have a moisture meter which they use to check if the coffee is dry.
“We get higher prices for our coffee since Nucafe sells it directly to overseas buyers. It is a sure way to avoid exploitation by middlemen that buy the coffee from non-members,” Mayanja points out.

She said each farmer’s coffee is labelled and its quality checked separately. When a member’s coffee does not meet the required quality standards, it is returned to him or her.

Immaculate and her husband, Mr Mayanja, keep two Friesian cows under zero grazing.
She says the farmers’ group gets training in good animal husbandry practices from organisations such as Masaka Diocesan Development Organisation (Maddo), Send a Cow, National Agricultural Research Organisation (Naro), East African Diary Development Programme and Unbound.

“As a cooperative society, we request them to send us instructors and they meet us as a group. We get training not only in animal husbandry but also in using cow dung and urine as manure,” she told Seeds of Gold.
“They teach us rainwater harvesting technologies and irrigation. As zero-grazing cattle keepers, we need large amounts of water and we have been enabled to have tanks at home. Some households use biogas for lighting and cooking.”

Meet set standards
Maddo, under its heifer programme, has donated 40 cows to individual farmers while Send a Cow has donated 120 cows.
The society has three milk collecting centres: Kyabbogo, Kyanngoma, and Kasaana, to which the farmers take their milk to a collecting centre, where it is checked to ensure that it meets the set quality standards.

Some of it is taken to Kyabakuza in Masaka where it is turned into yoghurt while the rest is transported to a shop in the town where it is sold.

“We sell a litre at Shs900 and we are paid every fortnight. Farmers sell only the morning milk under this arrangement because we don’t have the equipment to preserve it. This is the milk that the farming family members may have for domestic consumption or sell to their neighbours.”

Membership of the cooperative society is drawn from 11 smaller farmers groups across the sub-county.

Four of these groups are members of Kingo Farmers’ Cooperative Society under a banana wine project.

They are Tukolere Wamu Kyabbogo Farmers’ Group, Buli mu Ttaka Women’s Group, Kabukolwa Farmers Group, and Kagganda Local Chicken Keepers Group.