Teachers urged to engage in commercial agriculture

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 FARMING 

Use your free time to engage in commercial agriculture.

That is the message of Dillys Ayigaru, the headteacher of Arua city-based Muni Girls' Secondary School, to fellow teachers.

Ayigaru is herself into small-scale commercial farming and has a garden of mostly tomatoes next to the school's garden.

Passinate about matters agriculture, the school head noted that with the increase in personal and household demands, farming is the way to go — and it pays.

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“Join farming in your extra or free time. Agriculture pays," she urged teachers on Wednesday during a tour by evaluators of the school's innovative projects under the Green Schools Initiative.

"My tomato garden helped to supplement my income. In my first harvest, I mainly sold it to people near the school but I plan to do more aggressive farming and my target now is to start selling to the main market in Arua city,” said Ayigaru.  

She devotes the evening hours after classes or her free time to her small garden within the school premises and at home.

“At home, I grow my apples in my Sadolin tins. I love to innovate and see how plants can be managed."

At her school-based tomato farm, Ayigaru created ridges so that when it rains heavily, the excess water runs off and if there is little rainfall, whatever is there will remain in the garden and not flow out.

“Just from this one line, you can get up to 40 to 45 tomato plants and if each plant produces 60 fruits, that is quite a good amount of money that you will be getting," she said, pointing to one row in her garden.

"It is not about the amount of land that you have. You can be innovative and see how you can place these tomatoes in specific places because they do not need a lot of space."

Meanwhile, the students of Muni Girls' SS are also actively engaged in semi-commercial agriculture on the school premises.

They grow tomatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions, maize and groundnuts for consumption at school. They sell off the excess to members of the community.

In fact, the evaluation team was just in time to find Harriet Bakko, a resident of Arua city, just from buying a basin of tomatoes picked fresh from school garden.