Busoga Diocese to promote Museveni’s 4-acre model farming on church land
Once the church completes its ongoing exercise of titling all its land across the diocese, Lubaale said they intend to utilise their vast land to set up different farming enterprises for the church’s sustainability, including their priests.
Lubaale said that once the ongoing titling of church land is completed, the diocese will embark on establishing various farming enterprises to ensure its sustainability and support its clergy. (Photo by Jackie Nambogga)
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The bishop of Busoga Diocese, the Rt Rev. Prof. Grace Lubaale, says plans are underway to implement President Yoweri Museveni’s four-acre model farming on its church land.
Once the church completes its ongoing exercise of titling all its land across the diocese, Lubaale said they intend to utilise their vast land to set up different farming enterprises for the church’s sustainability, including their priests.
According to the prelate, the institution will prioritise coffee, banana, and cocoa on top of embracing oil palm growing.
He was Monday responding to a suggestion by the First Deputy Premier and East African Affairs minister Rebecca Kadaga, who implored the diocese to utilise its vast land for crop growing.
Kadaga said there was serious money in the oil palm crop, urging Busoga Diocese, including individuals, to take on this enterprise.
She regretted the small packages that come with retiring clergy when the diocese was capable of utilising its land productively and be in a position to offer befitting envelopes.
Some priests and their church committees were hiring out church land to sugarcane growers and individuals involved in subsistence food production.
Whereas many people in Busoga have engaged in sugarcane growing regardless of their land sizes, Kadaga, who is also the Kamuli district woman legislator, said the oil palm crop is among the game changers, urging farmers to contemplate her suggestion.
She expressed gratitude for how the people of Buvuma and Kalangala were minting cash out of this crop.
“I rarely engage in farming, but I am preparing my land in Mbulamuti because there is serious money in oil palm growing,” she said.
However, Lubaale welcomed Kadaga’s idea as timely since he had already led a delegation of 15 Christians to the oil palm growing centre in Buvuma for a benchmark.
The bishop concurred with Kadaga’s confession as a lucrative enterprise, saying he was already preaching its growth.
He said establishment of the various enterprises would be based on a scientific point of view to determine what would be grown depending on the size of the land and what was suitable among the four crops.
“As a bishop, I am going to mobilise people to grow those 4 crops on church land and as individuals in homes and families,” he said.
Next year, Lubaale said he would be establishing a 4-acre model farm at the diocesan headquarters in Bugembe for people to learn.
Also, they will deploy a full-time extension officer required to assist whoever visits the farm for learning and to gain more skills.
“We shall have coffee, banana, oil palm and cocoa on an acre each with a full-time extension officer to assist potential farmers with skills and knowledge in all enterprises as part of the socio-economic transformation we are putting in the diocese,” he revealed.
In areas where they have about 50 acres, it would be for growing coffee, cocoa, and oil palm, and where it is very small, it would be strictly for banana growing.
Lubaale said he would also grow similar crops on his personal farm in Kamuli, although he started with oil palm.
In Busoga, the government, under the National Oil Palm Project (NOPP) rolled out the growing of the crop in the districts of Mayuge, Namayingo and Bugiri as part of a broader effort to boost agricultural productivity aimed at improving livelihoods
Under this project, David Ziija, the Mayuge LC5 chairperson, said the government partnered with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which offered about sh717B to support smallholder farmers with seedlings, digging holes, fertilisers, pesticides, and training in agronomic practices.
Upon harvesting, Ziija, who is among the beneficiary farmers, said the government would recover its money by deducting it from the farmers.
Unlike sugar cane, which takes 12 to 16 months to mature, with oil palm, Kadaga said it takes 4 years, but stressed that at harvest, one would keep earning every 10 days for a span of 25 years.
Information obtained by former agriculture state minister Fred Bwino Kyakulaga noted that in each acre, one earns between sh500,000 and sh1m.
Kadaga assured farmers of a ready market, saying that for Uganda alone, there is a need for oil palm, soap, cosmetics, including products that use oil palm as raw material.
The government spends sh1.1 trillion on imported oil, but once people grow this crop, the expenditure would go down.