Farmers to use phones to manage farms

By Stella Naigino

FARMERS have been taught how to use mobile phones not only for making and receiving calls but also to manage their farms.

This comes after experts realized that farmers are vulnerable to middlemen who say, 'this product has died, there is no market at all, so you had better sell to me'.

This is how they exploit them and farmers end up being cheated by middle men who buy their produce at a very low cost.

The call was made Charles Ogwal the president of Uganda national farmers’ federation during a farmers meeting in Mukono district.

“A mobile phone is the single most transformative technology for development,” he said.

Ogwal told farmers that with a phone they are sure of success in business.

“He urged them to use their phones to communicate with people in Kampala: for example, find out how many sacks of potatoes they need,” he says.

It means you can stay at home, as you do business and still earn like any other person.

Ogwal said a phone, can be used to call for help in emergency situations for instance, if there is an outbreak of a disease on your farm that you don’t understand, it will be easy for you to be helped by just making a phone call.

Still you can find information about crop prices, it also enable you to do cashless transactions and banking services, which simply saves someone from making a long journey

"I work with rural areas now, and it's amazing that everywhere I go someone pulls out a mobile phone. They are very important because farmers before did not have a clue of where the market was. They could not communicate,”Ogwal said.

"But now they can call around and know what the prices are. They can call their relatives in town, for example, and ask how much a bunch of bananas costs, so they get an idea of what the price is for their produce.” he adds

Another cheap alternative is text messaging, but illiteracy is another obstacle for some of the market information services being pioneered by networks.

Ogwal cited examples like for ‘food net’ which can be selected by a farmer and it brings up a list including beans, cassava, coffee, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, rice and sorghum, with market prices updated daily.