For Joseph Kasekende of Bunyoni Village, Miti Parish, Calisiso Rural District, Kyotera County, growing coffee is a four-time task. His first undertaking is conventional coffee cultivation, which includes suitable methods for maintaining coffee plantations, harvesting, drying, and selling.
His second business is a coffee nursery, where he produces cloned Robusta coffee plants to sell to other farmers.
His third undertaking is coffee tourism, which welcomes visitors, some of whom come from abroad to see how coffee is grown. His fourth undertaking, which is still in its infancy, consists of the production and packaging of powdered coffee that can be sold to numerous visitors to his farm
Farm group
Kasekende is a thought leader in his area and is one of the founders of Miti Farmers Field School, whose members meet regularly to discuss agricultural issues and learn about new agricultural innovations.
“I’m not the president because I think it’s better for me to just be a member and maybe play an advisory role,” he told Seeds of Gold. The group also has a savings and credit component. They sell their coffee collectively as a group and recently built a large store with a concrete coffee drying yard. The group also has a public demonstration coffee plantation, about an acre in size, where farmers are encouraged to go and learn about best practices for growing coffee.
How it started in agriculture
Kasekende, a trained agronomist and extension worker, moved into the coffee-growing business in 1995 after taking a Robusta coffee cloning course at the Ntaavo Agricultural Research Institute in the Mukono area. “Then we prepare varieties A, B, C, D, and others, which are now slowly being destroyed by the incurable coffee wilt disease.
“My first kindergarten was in Ngoma Village, Nabigasa County, Kyotera District,” says Kasekende. The business proved to be quite profitable and by 1998 he had made enough money to buy 50 acres of land in the village of Bignonia, where his current farm is located.
Robusta coffee nursery
In Bignonia, he founded a thriving Robusta coffee nursery to grow Robusta KR coffee seedlings resistant to the dreaded coffee wilt disease. It grows thousands of seedlings and the nursery attracts customers from across the Midwest and beyond. In addition to running a coffee nursery, he has been growing cloned Robusta coffee since 1998, when he settled on his current farm. He has 12 acres of coffee from which he harvests 150 to 200 bags of dried kiboko coffee (dried coffee cherries) annually. Since he is also an environmentalist, about four or five acres of land are occupied by natural rainforest, while the rest is occupied by banana plantations, bio-fortified potato crops with orange pulp, cattle (cows and pigs), and Yucca.
Crafty
“To earn more money from the harvest, we, as members of Mitya Farmer Field School, agreed to sell our coffee together as a group. We all grow cloned Robusta coffee that has berries of the same size, ”Kasekende told Seeds of Gold. “We make sure that we all choose coffee that is red, ripe and dries well on clean surfaces. We then negotiate a higher price for our crop and sell it to the highest bidder. We already have our own shop and we are planning to buy our own peeler to sell the FAQ (kase) beans, which always have higher prices, ”he says.
Innovation
Since it also contains pigs and cattle, Kasekende does not need synthetic fertilizers on his farm. “When we sell coffee, we return the coffee husk to use as fertilizer. In my case, I use coffee husks as bedding in a pigsty, where they are stored for about a year before transferring them to the coffee and banana plantations. We also use cow manure to produce biogas and then apply liquid manure from the biogas tank to crops. Any cow manure that is not used for biogas production is applied directly to the coffee or banana plantations, ”says Kasekende.There are also many traditional shade trees on his coffee plantation. Some of them are fruit trees, while others, like the ejirikichi, are preserved for cultural purposes.
Agritourism
In reality, the plantation is designed as a tourist attraction and is already attracting visitors from abroad who want to see how coffee is grown. When visitors arrive at the farm, Kasekende said, they are asked to eat dried boiled coffee cherries in accordance with Buganda’s traditional practice of welcoming visitors.
