Livingstone Kajajata, a commercial farmer who owns a tractor started farming with a traditional plough and for a long time, his maize yields peaked at 1.2 tons per acre. He got frustrated as he could not break even and hired out part of his 92 ha land to other farmers as it was not productive as he had hoped. When he learnt of CF mechanized min-tillage, he was sceptical.
“At first I did not take the REDS staff serious because I had seen many organizations come, teach and go without making any significant impact for the smallholder farmer. I thought this was going to be the same story, however, I took time to listen and somehow got convinced about using a tractor ripper instead of a plough and decided to try out CF mechanized min till technology”.
With his first trial on 0.4Ha, he immediately noted fuel savings from an average of US$21 to US$13 per acre and the maize crop was of vigorous growth and yield, without any application of fertilizers apart from crop residue retention. With such results, he shared his CF experience with farmers in his neighbourhood and started to provide them with tillage services. Livingstone went on to woo and train other TSPs in the Mityana district and converted them from conventional ploughing to CF mechanized minimum tillage, supervising the usage of the Ndume tractor ripper and making sure they do the right thing. To date, he has trained 10 tillage service providers all actively engaged in providing the service to smallholder farmers in the region. On an individual level, Livingstone has 7.7Ha of his own established under CF and is a bean seed multiplier for Pearl Seeds Company, a country-wide supplier of seeds.