About 50 members of the Tekera Community in Buwunga Sub-county, Masaka District and their children stood around a pair of oxen fastened to their plough, on November 8, 2008.
Many of them confessed they had not seen oxen digging or doing any other work before. They were listening attentively to the oxen traction instructor, Mr Matia Kiyimba, who was taking them through their first lesson on how to use oxen for cultivation.
A few minutes later, they were to see for themselves what great labourers the oxen can be as they watched Mr Kiyimba commandeering the two animals to plough in a demonstration garden nearby.
He told the astounded villagers that the pair of oxen could cultivate an acre of land in just four hours. It was also a moment of joy in this remote community of Masaka District where some two years before, there wasn’t a school or a dispensary, where modern farming skills were hardly talked about and where due to poor road network connection, agricultural extension workers seldom went. The two oxen that they watched tilling the land were theirs to use in their Tekera Community for the coming years.
They were a donation to them to till their individual household land in turns at hardly any cost. The Tekera Project headed by a volunteer Canadian couple, Bruce and Brigitte Daley recently constructed a modern primary school and a dispensary at Tekera. The project has a demonstration garden where the community members work under the guidance of an agricultural extension worker to gain new farming skills.
Cheaper option
“99 per cent of our farmers cannot afford to buy a tractor,” Kiyimba said. “But about half of the farmers can buy oxen to use for labour on their farms for increased production.” The farmers of Tekera were also surprised to learn that the oxen can also be used for transport.
“They can carry as many as 26 jerry cans of water in this ox cart,” he said, pointing at the cart fastened to the oxen. The cattle may be used to transport manure to various places in the fields. They can be put to several other uses including crop harvesting and transportation of harvest from the fields.
They are themselves a source of animal manure. Indeed, the issues
that he kept mentioning were quite real to the rural farmer. Use of the
ox-cart could ease wood fuel transportation and carrying grass for
mulching or feeding animals under zero grazing.
If they can
transport large amounts of water, such as 26 jerry cans, then the
farmer can depend on them for supply of water for irrigation during
times of drought.
Some of the farmers of Tekera probably viewed all these ideas as real possibilities now that the oxen had arrived in their home area. As Uganda makes the initial strides towards modernisation of agriculture, it must be realised that we must reduce dependency on human labour. Commercialised farming requires large machines such as tractors for high level production. But since tractors are expensive to access, the ordinary Ugandan farmer’s next immediate alternative appears to be ox-cultivation.
Ox-drawn ploughs may not be as heavy as tractors but they can still be used in seed bed preparation and cover large areas in a surprisingly short time even in hard to plough soils. Human labour is expensive too as all labourers must be paid. As more and more people acquire education and gain access to specialised skills, it is increasingly becoming difficult for them to choose to be mere labourers on other people’s farms.
For a long time in the not so distant past, the majority of farmers particularly in the central region depended on human labour mainly from other ethnic communities who have long stopped coming to that region to seek that kind of employment. If today there is a marked general decline in the production of the major crops in the region, one could argue that the problem is linked to reduced cheap labour. But ox cultivation which is now being introduced in Masaka and the neighbouring districts could help reverse the situation.
Can be used across the country
Kiyimba said that ox cultivation which has for many years been practiced in Eastern Uganda was introduced in Masaka Region only as recently as April 2008 when Kamuzinda Farm, where he is based, started training a cross breed of castrated boran and the local ‘Karimojong’ cattle for ox cultivation.
They are trained at the age of two years and once trained, can be used for some 15 years. The training period is between three and six months. “Like all cattle, they must be well looked after,” he said. “They are never to be beaten. They are trained to obey oral commands, moving, stopping and turning as they are told.”
Kamuzinda Farm has donated trained oxen to a number of farmers groups in various villages already, which include Kabwoko, Mulundu, Kyanamukaaka, Lubumba, Kyantale and Kamuzinda Farm School. Tekera was the most recent recipient. Each recipient group consists at least 20 farming households.
Masaka District Agricultural Officer, Ms Prosy Mutumba, said that ox cultivation has taken this long to begin in the region because mostly, it was devoted to perennial crops unlike in Eastern Uganda where annual or seasonal crops are grown.
“However right now, we strongly recommend it since even here, the farmers actually grow the crops and the oxen do a multiplicity of other jobs. We really want other farmers not only in this region but all over the country to take up ox cultivation for higher production.”
