Thanks for all the help you’ve given me already on this message board with other questions. We are Christian Veterinary Missionaries and have been in Uganda for about 4 months now and are having trouble with seeing how anyone sustains small-scale piggeries! I have some early numbers I’ve been running and it’s discouraging.
Commercial concentrated pig food here is around 205,000 UGX per large bag, or say $65 USD. Mature female pigs are bringing around 800,000 UGX or say $230 USD at market. So if a pig eats more than 4 bags of food in her lifetime then the owner is losing money. I haven’t gotten the measurements of how much food each one eats in a day, but I believe they are easily eating more than 4 bags of food in their lifetime. They are generating some piglets but they also eat like crazy after weaning. Piglets are bringing 100,000 at best here. It seems to take 1 or 2 piglets to buy their food each litter. It feels like the other piglets sell to equal the food the mom eats during and after pregnancy. The piggery I’m advising has around 10 grown pigs but is also paying some fee for “rent” of the piggery. Water is an additional expense and has to be hauled twice daily about 60 meters. I believe the guys are hauling around 70 gallons per day…ughhh.
We tried cutting corners by making our own banana stalk silage but I have early numbers of that too now, and it’s similarly discouraging. We have access to quite a few free banana stalks here. By the time we paid guys to cut the stalks small enough and bought molasses, salt, and some bran we added it came to somewhere between 80,000-100,000 UGX or like half the cost of commercial feed, and that was for 1 barrel of silage. It took a whole day for me and 3 other guys.
So how does anyone have pigs that are sustainable? I am wondering if shifting to rabbits (I have 4 that I’m trying in my own backyard hutch) or goats is the best option. Those of you that have been in Community Development for awhile can you give me advice?
Thanks so much to everyone. You are a blessing here on the ECHO site.
As you’re with CVM I’m sure you’re aware of all the below, but contributing it for the sake of others reading this thread.
ECHO Asia has done quite a bit of work around banana stalk silage in the past. It’s often one of the alternative feeds that are plentiful in the topics. There are a range of other crop by-products or wild-harvest available feeds that could be of similar feed value to banana stems after boiling or fermenting. Here in Thailand, wild taro growing in ditches would be an example. However, these take a lot of work to gather and process.
I won’t try to guess at what’s available in your context but perhaps others in this forum might have an idea?
It’s also good to note that the feed value of a lot of these products are often relatively low. Banana stalk silage for example is suitable for maintaining a mature sow or boar as part of the overall ration. In trials at ECHO Asia, we noted that using banana stalk silage for grower pigs increased the total required concentrate feed, as the pigs grew slower and needed concentrate supplement for longer.
Another option for pigs would be to grow feed supplements yourself. This takes a lot of labor and requires land. An example of feed grown on-farm for pigs in SE Asia would be sweet potato. For a smallholder without alternative livelihood sources and their own land, this may be worthwhile.
Goats are much easier to feed than pigs. Goats are ruminants while pigs’ digestive systems are similar to humans. There is a much wider range of wild-harvested or farm-produced forages that could be used to productively grow goats. However the profitability of this is going to come down to the overall productivity of the farm and the market prices for saleable goat products. Before setting up a new enterprise, it could be useful to budget out your assumptions for input costs, products (milk and/or meat goats), and average market prices.
Thank you Shaun! Good info…good ideas. I’m finding out that nothing is easy (or everyone would be doing it). We may be shifting to goats as you have mentioned. I’m heading out right now to open a barrel of silage with our workers and see if it fermented correctly. Blessings to you!
I am no expert in this, but I was wondering if you have any options for value added products? For something to be sustainable it must be profitable. The basic equation is:
Profit (loss) = Income - Expenses
The two ways to increase profit are decrease expenses and increase income. If it is difficult to decrease expenses further, maybe we can explore increasing income…
Generally speaking, live, wholesale sale of a meat animal is the least profitable option for the farmer raising it. If you take the same animal, process it for meat and sell the meat the profit margin tends to increase significantly especially if you process it yourself. Of course, sanitation, proper food handling, and the local regulations for those must be considered. The value adding process can continue further than just butchering the animal. For example, smoked and cured meats tend to be higher value items things such as smoked bacon and sausage and cured hams. When the fat is rendered into lard, it becomes shelf stable and is valuable for use in cooking, baking, skincare products, etc… What if, you rendered the fat into lard and then used it to make hand balm? What if you not only smoked the meat but also used it to make pulled pork sandwiches or whatever equally delicious dishes that are appropriate for the cultural context? A sandwich sells for much more per unit of weight than the original animal or even the same meat raw.
The opportunities for value adding are seemingly endless if one is creative and has time and effort to invest in it. Of course there are many additional considerations: market for the new product, cultural acceptance and appropriateness of the product, regulations, additional labor, additional skills required, cost of any other tools or materials required, etc… I do not know your context or limitations but hopefully this serves as a useful brainstorming session.
Hi Davis! Seth here.
I just thought I would share our experience with pigs here at ECHO NA as well; our pigs are fed almost completely off of forage. They get some banana stalk silage and food scraps as well, but that makes up less than 10% of their diet. I don’t know how much access you have to land/forages, but on the scale of “Doing More Work” <-------> “Spending More Money” forages are way on the Work side. I would think that in Uganda it would be similar to FL in that it’s really easy to feed forage during the wet season and pretty difficult during the dry season. It may also depend on the genetics of the pigs being raised; our pigs are very well adapted to a forage diet, and they grow just fine without supplemental protein. To echo @Shaun_Snoxell, if you have access to abundant plants that other people ignore, that is a great source of food. If you are dealing with imported genetics that require a more commercial diet, then that puts you at a disadvantage and, in my opinion, would be a reason to switch to a different type of livestock. Genetics would also affect how well they do on the banana stalk silage (more forage-adapted pigs would probably have better results).
Pigs are water-hungry, and if water is an issue, you would definitely want to make sure you have a way to deliver water to them efficiently. Open tubs tend to get knocked over for wallowing… A nipple coming in from an outside tank will mean a lot less water waste, but you may be doing that already.
On the note of silage (not to offend or anything), once you get good at it, it won’t take so long. With you and three other guys and one whole day, once you have your process down, you could be making quite a few barrels a day, as many as you have materials for. Check out the video from ECHO NA on banana stalk silage (Lightning Talk - Banana Stalk Silage | ECHOcommunity.org) and this EDN from ECHO Asia (Making On-Farm Pig Feed: Farm-Generated Formulas vs. Commercial Feeds | ECHOcommunity.org) if you need a refresher. Silage had the potential to be a great low-cost feed, but if you’re paying retail price for most of the ingredients it’s less cheap. If you can get byproducts from a mill or something that is ideal (like seed cakes from a date or coffee processor or hulls from a grain mill) that will lower the cost and increase the value of the silage.
Assuming there is a way to raise pigs successfully, there is going to be a cost-effective threshold somewhere. Maybe raising a sow to maturity is going to cost more than it’s worth, and piglets don’t bring in enough, but maybe 6-month olds pigs are the sweet spot (or something like that). And maybe 10 sows eat too much and their piglets don’t sell enough to offset, but 5 or 6 sows can be offset by raising their offspring to the 6-month mark. But I’m not a marketer and there are better people to advise you in that area I’m sure.
Rabbits have the potential to produce a lot of meat, and can be easier than chickens, if you can keep them healthy (which is the challenge in the tropics). I think they are a great option when done well. Goats, like Shaun said, are probably the most well-adapted to your climate and the easiest to feed, if you have access to forage for them. Goats need less food per unit of body weight than most livestock, but the food they do get needs to be of a higher quality than other livestock, so that’s something to keep in mind. The good thing about pigs is that they can eat “scraps” that wouldn’t be able to be fed to other animals (but they do eat a lot more volume for sure).
Hello Seth! I hope you are doing well, and it’s good to hear from you. We need to enjoy some morning or afternoon coffee again together. You are the best at making coffee! That is another topic too, because we haven’t figured out how to make our own coffee here. There are plenty of beans…
OK, that is such good advice you are giving me. By the way, we opened a barrel of silage today and the pigs gobbled it, barely taking some quick drinks. They love it, so we’ll keep trying some things to make the banana stalk silage work. Thanks for the encouragement that we can get better at making it.
You have articulated something we were thinking about which is the marketing sweet spot. It may be better for us to be narrower not growers, etc. All these things are something we need to consider.
I am grateful to have learned from you when I was at the class there last year.
Blessings to you friend and everyone at ECHO. I am using info from TAD 1 course EVERY DAY here!!
Good morning Mr Agadaigbo,
i just want to learn from your experience in Nigeria.
If one harvest food scraps of plantain peels, banana peels, yam peels, vegetable, cabbage clean the up and blend, add some vitamins and mineral can that reduce the cost of feeding substantial?
Thank you for your reply.
The combination is a good nutrition but the plantain and banana peels may be scarce for regular supply.
Nigeria have a variety of grasses that supply nutrients as animals feeds.
Could you extend your work to Nigeria?
If the limiting factor for producing more banana stalk silage is the fact that you are chopping it by hand, maybe Seth and others in the conversation could suggest a machinery available in East Africa that could be modified for that purpose, especially if the banana stalks are readily available.
Thank you Julie! It turns out that I have applied for one of our organization’s (CVM) grants for just such a device. We think we have found them advertised in Kampala as plant shredders or silage choppers or something like that. They are powered by a gasoline engine. I will let you know what happens, if we get the grant, etc.
Turns out we are making more silage on Saturday. We’ll be gathering things tomorrow for that project.
It is fun to make silage because we have great fellowship and usually a meal during all the chopping.
I have been in East Africa just short of 15 years and gone through many changes. I went to my course at ECHO NA in 2010 as a medical missionary and now I run 2 farms and have adopted 11 kids. God is good!
We tried pig farming along with other things but left it because of the rising cost and low profit margin. We now have a goat farm. We started 3 years ago with 1 Boer male and 30 local females and currently have 182 goats after a few sales. We continue to improve the breed and our next trip to the goat market in Kampala will be to sell the last of our local females and bring in more Savannah males and females to continue to improve our breeds.
That all said press on with your work and try not to be discouraged. The others have made good suggestions. We have bought alfalfa, forage sorghum, bracaria and Napier seeds to supplement and try sillage but haven’t gotten there yet. A diesel sillage chopper machine can be purchased from 1 million to 2 million. I think you are on the right track just don’t get discouraged.
Some of the successful pig farmers I know grow their own maize, the prices are ever increasing, and cut green vegetation to supplement. Here in the village local farmers let their pigs run loose which I don’t think is good for several reasons.
Early last year swine fever spread through the area and all the local pigs were lost. Ours did well because we have a fence and pig houses.
Pork is the most consumed meat in Uganda and if you butcher your own pigs and sell by kilo it really increases your profit margin.
Prayerfully and wisely move forward. As with anything new it takes time and there is always a learning curve.
