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.