Biodigester at the slaughterhouse

This is my last day in office before the end of the year. It is time to post my last post about my Ugandan trip, so that my blog can also serve as report! Remember during that last trip visited the slaughterhouse of Wambizi. As part of their waste management, they recently installed a bio - digester.

A biodigester is like a mechanical stomach. It is fed with organic material, which is broken down (decomposed) by micro-organisms (bacteria) is an oxygen-free (anaerobic) environment to produce a renewable energy called biogas (methane and carbon dioxide) and other material that is mainly used as fertilizer.

What here the stories behind the Wambizi biodigester, how it has been build, how it is working, and how the resulting gas is used for boiling the water for slaughter.

Slaugherhouse visit in Wambizzi

As part of our field trip to understand better the pig value chain in Hoima, Uganda, we also wanted to understand better waste management from the pigs. However in Hoima there is no abattoir yet, as all pigs are slaughtered in backyards (what they call slaughter places) .

 Therefore we visited the Wambizzi abattoir, in the suburb of Kampala. I alwayswonder what i need to imagine when i think of an abattoir in the developing world, and i have seen too many extremes from dirty backyard to super modern infrastructure. Wambizzi was something in between. 

the marabu

There is no asphalt in the place, and so when we arrived, the place was muddy and Marabou's were eating some left over. We first were invited to join for a discussion with the manager and some cooperative members. We learned a lot from them.

pig waiting to be slaughtered

First of all it is a farmer owned cooperative, where farmer can get their pig slaughtered for a fee. Non cooperative member can also get pig slaughtered here, but the fee is higher. If requested the cooperative does also do some marketing, linking the farmer with alive pigs with a buyer of slaughtered meat.

the room where meat is hung after slaughtering

They used to have a cold room, but it was broken during the last war, this is more than 30 years ago... and somehow they have never found the means to reconstruct it. That's why they are slaughtering only in the morning and only pig for which they already have a buyer.

tables where meat gets cuts

The location of the abattoir is quite convenient near to Kampala, but there are competing land use claims and it is now located on the trace for the new highway. The government has asked them to leave the the place and they are looking for a new location. This is also an opportunity to modernize, however the eviction compensation will not be enough to support the emergence of an new slaughterhouse.

We also went on a tour in the slaughterhouse. Lucky me, it was after lunch, so no slaughtering anymore, just cleaning.

alive pig storage

Hot water is needed to take of the hair of the pigs, that's why the room where pigs are slaughtered is next to the one where water is boiled. Up until today water is boiled with water, but they are building a bio digesters which should recycle waste and give them enough energy to replace the wood. We will look at the bio digester in a separate post. 

hot water boiler

When a pig is slaughtered the blood is collected in a pit, where it is mixed with soap that is used to keep the place safe. The combination of blood and soap is not ideal, as soap inhibits the biodigesting process, and therefore the blood is just released into the near by river. Not only this is polluting but it is also a way to spread diseases.

room where the pigs are slaughtered and blood collected

Intestines are kept separately and sold to some people who cleaning them and sell them for dog food. This is an outsourced service that is not managed by the cooperative however it is lowering the waste and provides some job opportunity.

cleaning the intestines

The slaughterhouse does not have a incinerators, so hairs are sometimes burnt but mainly piled up on what is now about a 6 meter high compact mass. Pig hair do not decompose easily.

waste pile

 We have seen that the slaughterhouse is providing good services to its farmers and offers a clean environment for slaughtering pigs. It is challenged with waste management and is going innovative way to address those and their mobile biodigerster is an example of this.

room where the meat is hanging before sales

However, i have been shocked by their begging attitude, "look we are trying our best", "we support smallholder farmers" help us to get money. I know from own experience that meat markets are growing in Africa, and that there is margin in the business to be collected. But where does it go? Why is the slaughterhouse not able to raise at least some profit to develop further? In my discussions with the manager and the head of the cooperative i tried to investigate these questions? My conclusion was, it is simply the lack of entrepreneurship. I had a longer discussion with them about the fact that the new models donors look at are models that include silent capital, meaning no donation but very fair investment capital (with low or zero interest rate). It was an interesting discussion, which led to my very personal conclusion, that the problem here is the lack of entrepreneurship. If they would develop a business plan in which they can show that they have even just a very small return on investment, I am sure that they can win donors ready to donate part and lend part of the necessary capital to develop a new smallholder based slaughterhouse.

the field team Edmund, myself, Grace, Joanne and our driver, the abattoir manager next to Edmund

Both the manager and the cooperative head listened carefully, and i have hope that some of my reflections opened there mind to new models. I still have not figured out how to really support them in their process to become entrepreneurial while remaining on their very innovative waste management approach... Any idea? Then don't hesitate to contact me!

Tobacco production and its challenges for crop modelling

Before the end of the year, I also would like to finish my reporting from this years field trip to Uganda, when we were looking at the pig value chain in Hoima.

We crossed the fields with the aims to understand better how feeds and fodders are produced and try to understand how we can model this best. A first step was to understand rice which i described in an older post. But crossing the fields we discovered another dynamics : tobacco.

the sheds to dry tabbaco

In the landscape you recognize tobacco at the many sheds used for drying the tabacco, but we also saw the trucks picking the dry leaves.

We asked around and discovered that tobacco was a very good business as it would all be contracted. That means, farmers have a guaranteed market for their product and the tobacco gets picked at farm gate. Also they receive on credit all the input beginning of the season and need to pay them with the harvest.

tobacco ready to be picked

This is a very good low risk offer for the smallholder farmer, and therefore could seriously compete with feed and fodder production as the pig value chain intensives.

drying tabbaco

Tobacco only grows during the longer wet season, so the the land can be used for other crops during the short wet season.

Our model will need to reduce the amount of land available for feeds and fodder production, to account for tobacco, also we might need to allow users of our model to define this amount of land, to give opportunities to decision makers to understand trade-offs between to tobacco and the pig value chain.

How does research contribute to mitigation and adaptation in the agricultural sector?

After some break from writing on this blog, I am just in time to contribute to the climate change debate, which i hope to be able discuss it different angles in the up-coming posts. So keep following the climate change tag.

Lots of climate related research we do is sponsored by IFAD, among others the project on pig in Uganda careful reader already know of. IFAD visited the research projects they have sponsored to understand if agricultural research in the developing world does support smallholder farmers to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Wanna know about their conclusions? Check out this movie!

Risk diversification : or how to cope with african swine fever!

During my last trip to Hoima, Uganda, we visited the farmer Paul. He was a young dynamic farmer. He had more than 100 pigs when African swine fever took them whole away. He fortunately could sell them off before they died and could at least partially recover some investments.

Paul's pig structure in the middle of the pineapple field

We visited the  empty infrastructure that he want to restart using soon but with less pigs, around 60 pieces, or 6  production units with a sow that give around 8 piglets every six months, so having 8*6=48 pigs for sale every six months. 

His major business is the sales of piglets which brings a lot of people to his farm. He is convinced that one of his clients brought him African swine fever and therefore wants to move away from the piglet sales and outgrow more and slaughter in his slaughter place on farm. 

the well

His manure management was quite minimal, he had these channel leading manure to a soaking pit in the middle of his pineapple fields. The pineapple grew better and he was very happy about that. However he is also aware this is not an optimal management, and he would need to look into that as business would become more profitable again.

At least his shallow well to access water was in the amount of the soaking pit, so at least he would not pollute his own water. He is thinking about a bio-digester, as he could get free energy to heat his chicken as well as for hot water for backyard slaughtering of his pigs.

To feed his pigs he would rely on commercial feeds. But as he own his own mill, he would buy ingredient separately and mix his own feeds. As he did not have electricity on farm, the mill was powered  with a generator. As he grows this business, he wants to feed waste from chicken slaughtering to pigs, as well as the slurry from his future from his future bio-digester.

But what impressed me most with Paul is that despite of the loss from the pigs, he would continue business. He had chicken, a 1000 broilers and a 1000 layers to learn about this market.

And his pineapple business was not affected by diseases and gave him a constant income.

the chicken business

It was a nice example of a farmer who made farming an agribusiness. Risk was nicely diversified and no branch for his business could kick him out of farming fully, always one product would work.

Before we left, i asked him where he want to be in future. He told me that the farm i see now will become a model farm, as he want to get cheaper land outside Hoima for intensifying his pig production. There no one would be allowed in, but farmers would come to the model farm to buy piglets and for training and demonstration.

Daily farm planning

Will Paul be one of the two high level fully integrated farmers, participants of the workshop were dreaming about in the their vision for Hoima 2025? The future will show, but definitely he has the vision and the capacity.

Joanne, myself and Paul

Once again, I have been deeply impressed by a young man showing the world that agriculture is not a job for losers in society but for young entrepreneurs taking up the challenge to feed Africa while being profitable.

When economics drives the land use change

In my last trip to Uganda, we did a transect drive through Hoima district, in search of the major land dynamics and see if we can make sense of potential up-coming changes. We found three very interesting land ownership that may result in more land conflicts in the upcoming years.

The hills 

The hills are owned by the king and are to be kept as forest. Up until today the king is respected and the hills are still covered with forest. These forest play an important ecosystem function, namely for water infiltration, making sure that ground water recharges during rains and limits erorsion.

The forested hills owned by the king

During the participatory GIS it was unclear if the power of the king could maintained and therefore the forest maintained, or if with population growth the forest could be encroached.

The up-coming airport and oil industry 

In a post from my second last trip i discussed the benefits of having oil companies coming to the area. However, in this trip we came across the downside of it.

A sign claiming land rights for the local population

Smallholders have been asked to evacuate their land, for giving space to the up-coming airport and the buildings needed for the oil industry. Whereas smallholders with land rights have been compensated, there is a debate on if they have been compensated fairly and as the sign suggest on the image above, some people are not ready to leave their land...

Commercial timber production 

Forest used to be public goods, and people could make use of them, and therefore overused them. Many grazing land, former forest land, has been given to investors for timber production.

commercial forest

The forest is now back, and so the water infiltration and erosion prevention function restored, however the forest diversity is much lower, and therefore less suitable for some threatened species.
Also, poor people in the area have lost access to their cheap (free) building material as now they have to buy wood from the timber company. This is hampering development of poor household into more intensified pig keeping.

Land use is dynamic, change will happen, and there will be winners and losers. Making our ex-ante environmental assessment model spatially explicit, will allow to identify the winners and the losers, discuss trade offs and hopefully find win-win situation in an area that will inevitably change in the up-coming years.

Greenhouse gases and rice, is it always a problem : in serach of rice in Hoima

On my recent field trip to Uganda, next to a participatory GIS exercise with stakeholders, we also went for a transect drive, in order to understand the major landscape dynamics in order to model correctly possible impact from value chain intensification. 

Paddy rice is a major factor of climate change, as methane is emitted when growing on waterlogged soils. When we heart that there was rice in Hoima, we decided to focus on rice in order to understand how and where it grows and put some thoughts together on how we will model rice.

a rice field next to a groundnut field

We found a lot of upland rice, a rice that does not need irrigation and therefore does not source of greenhouse gases more than other crops. We also figure out that rice was part of a crop rotation, so one year we could find rice, the next sweet potatoes or groundnuts. Also we found rice that was inter-cropped with maize.

a rice field inter-cropped with maize

We discussed with a farmer who had one of the nicest fields. From him we learned that he is mixing his own chemicals to treat weeds. He calculated for us that treating his rice was cheaper than hiring labor to do the weeding. He also encroached on the wetland, which is humid and therefore suited to rice. The first years rice yields are high, the other fields would yield less. He also mentioned that he got the seeds for free from the cooperative. For the record, he also had two piglets , two dairy goats and some chicken. 

We concluded that rice should not be modeled separately from other crops, and that more cropland will be gained from the wetland for rice.

Where does the feed come from ? visiting the mills

In Hoima, often pigs are fed on maize and rice bran, which is referred to commercial feeds. We decide to visit the goodman mill, and discover where the bran comes from.

Farmers bring their rice to the mills for the milling. They can just pay for the milling services, and take back the rice and the bran. The husk is a waste that has no value.
But often they sell their rice or their bran to the mill and the mill trades it with the intermediaries.
The mill also sometimes organize transport to the farms to pick the rice and mill it.

For both product, the rice and the bran there is no problem to market the products

The mills is quite small, so there is no place for storage which is also why the owners are not thinking to mix own pig feeds. Also they don't seem to be worried about the up-coming big feed production mill (from Devenish), they think they will still get the rice business and anyway the bran is just a business with waste.

Off-rice season, the mill processes cassava and make cassava flour.
The manager told us about her vision. She want to improve on her storage and reach higher quality than now. Higher quality of products will allow her package her products and sell to re-seller directly : so adding value.

Clearly the small mills focus on the main products, rice and cassava, and not on the waste that can be fed to pigs. They don't see their role as feed producer, not now and not yet in the future.

Expert knowledge to parametrize an ex-ante environemental assessement model

Over the last year, i have been contributing to an ex-ante spatially explicity environmental impact assessment for intensifying value chains. This year we want to adapt the tool to the pig value chain in Hoima Uganda. In order to parametrize the model and develop the new modules that are particular to pigs, we combined a participatory GIS (geographical information system) with a transect drive through the landscape.

The objective of the PGIS is to learn from stakeholder about the natural resource base of the area with a particular focus on water and soil health for which little data is available, about the current and the future pig keeping systems.

Each groups were given a set of paper based maps, as well as transparencies upon which the groups could map the natural resources and the pig keeping systems on transparencies that could be laid over the paper base maps.

Two groups negotiating the amount of existing pig keeping systems

The participants identified four pig keeping systems :

• free range, where pigs are just roaming around
• theathered, where pigs are often kept within the banana trees that need a lot of manure
• padocking, pigs are enclosed within an area but free with the area
• intensive in build structures, pigs are kept in units from wood or concrete

 Each system was described in detail in terms of feeds, breeds, manure mangementchallenges, markets and mapped out.

participants stepping out of the timeship

In the afternoon, we asked to participants to board a timeship and we flied to Hoima 2025, and visited successful farmers as well as the poorest one. We then discussed how systems have changed : free range has disappeared, and high level integrated farms have emerged, these farms also have slaughterhouse  and a cold chain. The old and the new systems where also described and mapped.

weighting the future systems

In the end participants could weight in which system most of the farms will be in 2025.

Participants really enjoyed the day at the workshop, also because they have been engaged during the whole day, no one has felt bored even for a minute and we have collected the necessary base information in order to set up the environmental impact assessment tools!  Keep posted from the update from the transect drive and learn about Hoima's landscape dynamics.

Land matrix : a database for land deals

During my post-doc in Ethiopia, more and more land was given to global investors for the best or for the worst. My blog has tried to collect stories from around the world on good and bad deals in terms of land ownership. Research on land deals was not possible because of the lack of data.

Recently i came across the land matrix, a crowd-sourcing platform that tries to address the data gap by asking people to contribute to a database with the knowledge they have. A quite cool initiative and a first database on land deals!



Check it out yourself and add your knowledge to the database!

Pig value chain in Uganda : a stake for smallholders?

In one week, i will be returning to Hoima, Uganda to work with policy maker and other key decision makers involved in ILRI's Uganda Pig projects, to work on an environmental decision making support tool. Time to finish the reporting of the last trip.

group photo at the end of the Hoima trip

We went trough Hoima visiting small farmers such as John the model farm of Devenish, and continued crossing this landscape thinking about the stake of the smallholder.

How will this system evolve? In Europe pigs are kept by large farmers keeping thousands of pigs, what dynamics will prevent this phenomenon in Hoima? What is the comparative advantage of the smallholder?

At the consumer level there is no difference between pig meat from a big commercial farmer or a smallholder. So the price for both products will be the same. Commercial farmers will feed their pigs with commercial feeds that is and probably will remain expensive. That's why the commercial farmer will need to increase drastically the number of animal he keeps in order to benefit returns to scale. Are we still talking of a smallholder, when he owns two hundred animals?

The "real smallholder", the farmer that closes the environmental cycle, combines crops with livestock smartly without huge "industrial-like" investment and yet produces food surpluses in this world will only have a comparative advantage if his feeds are cheaper than the commercial/industrial farmer and therefore can compete. Using agricultural waste, such as crop residue efficiently to feed pig "for free" is one way to support the smallholder competitiveness, but in this world smallholder will not have plenty of pigs, but an optimal number corresponding to the amount of waste such as crop residue they produce on farm. So pigs will not support the poorest who have almost no land, as they also will not have the comparative advantage of free fodder.

A reflection to keep in mind as we are now preparing for the policy and decision maker workshop to parametrize our ex-ante environmental assessment tool for the area in the upcoming weeks! So follow the posts from my up-coming Uganda trip to discover more!

In the meantime, let me thank Robert and Emily from the ILRI office in Kampala for the smooth organization of this trip, and my whole team for the talk and reflections around the pig value chain in Uganda.

How will your life look like by 2050?

Recently i have been quite involved in doing foresight work, i.e understanding how we will be living in 2050. What will be the role of a smallholder? Where will food production take place? What environmental impacts will changes bring?



What i have learned over the last year analyzing data and traveling the developing world is that food production, and more particularly livestock keeping in not something rural, it is found all over including the high end areas of Nairobi. The biggest changes up to 2050 will be expected at the urban-rural fringe, where there is still space to produce at commercial or even industrial scales and where ways to reach the market both in terms of consumers and in terms of input (commercial feeds, veterinary services) in a short time.

Deepening myself into the topic, i found the shell new lenses on cities, showing how cities will change over the next decenies. They found 6 categories of cities around the world, offering us a new base to think about the urban-rural divide and its up coming developments : how will food be brought to people into each of these types of cities? what will be the role of agricultural production within the boundaries of these cities? And how will its suburb be organized?


A fascinating topic that hopefully we will take up soon. In the meantime get your own copy of the shell new lenses on cities here.

Can sutainable intensification go together with developing a pig value chain?

In my last trip to Uganda, we visited the Devenish project, a model pig farm funded by IrishAid. The project, bring new breed of pigs. The farm is currently functioning at 1/3 of its capacity, with about 30 pigs for breedings. Piglets are sold to farmers.

The farm manager mentioned that their major issue is manure management. The lagoon is already almost full in the few months of operation at 1/3 capacity. The manure is mixed with the water used for cleaning, and is stored in the open lagoon, which produces a lot of green house gazes that could actually be managed (for example with a biodigester).

The lagoon is too small for the farm, also because local farmer do not come and pick the free manure. Indeed local farmer have no idea on how to use it and it is quite difficult to transport liquid manure.

The most worrying part is soaking pit, where the overflow directly infiltrates next to the borehole for drinking water...
It is not very clear to what extend this is a problem at this stage, but in a near future ground water pollution could become a serious problem, especially if the pig intensification is about to bring up more bigger farms.
Better manure management is therefore critical and our team is looking into testing biodigesters in theses systems. A story to follow!

What is a farmer?

In my recent trip to Kisumu, I joint a focus group discussion with farmers to discover how they see their future. We had two questions we had asked farmers individually :

•  How will your livelihood strategy change?

a participant weighting her future livelihood strategy

1. off farm activities
2. farm diversification (new farm produce)
3. commercialization of existing farm produce
4. increasing farm size 

• How do you think will you income be composed ?

1. cultivation of food
2. cultivation of non-food
3. manufacture
4. trade
5. livestock

What stroke me in this discussion is that non of the farmer has put any weight to off-farm activities. All farmer intend to remain in agriculture, despite of the fact that many of them are already dependent on off farm income, for example by driving motorbikes. Also when one asks them about future income, few think it will be coming from food and feed productions, but from trade.

I was very puzzled about this result, as most of these farmers are cultivating on less than an acre of land and the proximity to Kisumu town offers plenty of off farm opportunities. My first explanation of this phenomenon is a self-selection process : those people who bet on off farm activities have probably already left, and therefore did not participate in our focus group discussion. But in a second stage, I turned to Irene, my colleague who is organizing these focus group discussion brilliantly and who very obviously has a full time job with ICRAF in Kisumu, and asked her : so are you farming? she said yes.

Irene, the farmer?

How? she is working full time just the same way i do in Nairobi... So i dug further, and i discovered that she and her family owns land, relatively far away from Kisumu, but she is investing on this farm, as she can afford buying agricultural inputs and therefore makes the critical decisions on the farm. However, she is not doing the farming there, she has family member to do it. So she is basically a phone farmer.

It was a great discussion through which i understood the very strong linkage that Kenyan have with their land. As long as one own or cultivate a square meter of greens, one will declare oneself as a farmer. So no wonder non of our participants will ever step out of agriculture, they will take up jobs in town and run their cultivation of 1/8 of an acre before going to work and when coming home and still be proud farmers.

a phone farmer?

I reminds me of my PhD time in Wageningen, I also owned a garden, where I was cultivating my own food. However, i never felt like a farmer, i would have refereed to myself as a happy gardener. Also recently i started to plant salads and courgette on my very small balcony in Nairobi, I wonder if under Kenyan definition i am a farmer too?

Let go back to our farmer Irene, she is working for agricultural research, probably earning a decent wage, and building up a network in town that will allow her to get good market access. I would not be astonished if in a few years she would decide to invest her money to make her land a commercial production bringing high value products to market and hire people to do this for her. For example, she could invest in a well and then cultivate berries, or go for intensive livestock keeping.

a junior farmer?

So when we are talking of smallholder farmers who are we talking about? are we scientists asking the right questions? are we able to differentiate between farmers like Irene and the smallholder farmer relying on his land only? Do we still talk of farmers when someone has a full time off farm job and is cultivating her/his own food? When we talk about commercialization, which farmer are we talking about? Where are the decisions about agriculture taken? And if we talk about the smallholder revolution, do we really want to focus on the poor smallholders relying fully on their land with a lack of capital and knowledge? or shouldn't we focus on farmers like Irene who have the knowledge, the capacity and the capital to commercialize and potentially offer employment to smallholders in the surroundings in a less favorable situation?

So what's your definition of a farmer?