UGANDA: Farmers earn more profit in growing passion fruit

As the saying goes, behind every successful man there is a woman, such is the story of a couple in Tunyi village in Bulambuli District, who switched from growing traditional crops to growing passion fruit.

For Steven Magoro, 50, and his wife Beatrice, this was the way to go since passion fruit mature in six months and are ready for the market.

Compared to the crops such as banana, coffee and beans which did not earn them a good income as per their expectations, growing passion fruits had more potential.

This was from 2011 when a local development partner TechnoServe with funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Century Bottling Company began engaging farmers in eastern Uganda in fruit growing. The Magoros quickly adopted the initiative to improve on how they were growing fruits.

Training in groups
“We used to grow passion fruit on trees where we could hardly harvest half a sack in one season, but when TechnoServe embarked on training us with the required agronomy practices, I can now harvest 30kg from every passion fruit plant,” Magoro said.

The couple started their passion fruit growing project with 55 seedlings but they have now increased it to 180 seedlings. During the first training sessions, the farmers were asked to form four groups of 15 members each. The Magoro couple belongs to one of the groups called Kuledane Farmers Group.

They were trained on how to graft their own seedlings as well as spacing them for increased yield.

According to Magoro, in the first year of engaging into the project, he used to harvest between 10kg to 15kg of passion fruit from every plant which he would sell at Shs1,000 per kilogramme.

But now the farmers’ groups are encouraged to collect their produce in bulk as a group since TechnoServe is capable of linking them to markets in Mbale, Busia and Kampala where they sell a kilogramme at twice or thrice the price; that is between Shs2,500 and Shs3,000.

From their five-hectare land, the Magoros are utilising one hectare for passion fruit growing and the rest are used for animal husbandry and growing coffee and bananas. On average, they earn Shs1m from their harvest of passion fruit every year.

Continuous harvesting
From this, they purchased a high-breed heifer cow and went ahead to rent land nearby to expand on the fruit farming activities.

Beatrice Magoro is grateful that they are now engaged in a farm activity which has turned out to be profitable. “It has been a real struggle taking our children to school but since we engaged in passion fruit growing, we have managed to send two of our children to boarding schools and four are in day schools,” she said.

Apart from the fruit maturing in six months, it has an added advantage of continuous harvesting. This is because once farmers harvest, they will prune the stem where harvesting was done. Then, a fresh stem will grow for more harvest to be effected in the next season.

Within the four groups, some farmers have specialised in producing the passion fruit seedlings which they sell to fellow farmers at Shs1,000 per seedling.

Apart from the achievements, the couple is faced with the challenge of expenditure on transport to take their produce to nearby market, the expensive inputs used to spray the fruit gardens and their lack of capacity to fully meet the required market demand. These are compounded with a challenge of people stealing their fruit mainly at night.

Source: Daily Monitor