Sheep Farming Botswana, Part One

Sheep farming Botswana, Part one

It was my brother, who the other day started talking about farming sheep, and it got me thinking....would it be worth it or viable to farm sheep in Botswana and what would be involved? When it comes to starting any enterprise the first thing that one needs to do is research. Research allows you to count the cost of an enterprise before you spend anything at all, it is of little use to start a an enterprise before counting the cost!

Counting the cost

1. Find out your Max Gross income. What does this mean? Basically you want to know how much is the max income your sheep will bring in, in one year or season before expenses. To find this answer I had to do some research, first I wanted to know how much could be got for one sheep, for this I went to Facebook and searched all the adverts of people buying and selling sheep in Ngamiland. I soon discovered that a common figure for a sheep was Bwp 1000.00 which was much higher then I imaged. The next bit of research that I did was to find out, how many lambs could a farmer expect to get from ten ewes in one year? Again I went for the max figure, that is saying that each ewe gives birth to twins and that there are no losses. This then leads us to conclude that ten ewes would give us 20 lambs that in 6 too 8 months would be sold for Bwp 1000.00 each, giving us the grand total of Bwp 20000.00.

Now this is a seriously inaccurate figure for the simple reason that its not realistic, lambs will die, you wont always get Bwp 1000.00 per sheep, not every ewe will have twins. However this is our  EMGI (Estimated Max Gross Income) this figure is important because now we know that, if we want too farm ten sheep and max 20 lambs, the seasons expenses  have to be way less then Bwp 20000.00 to make it profitable 

So how much does it cost to keep ten sheep and at max 20 lambs for one season? we will look into that in our next post, so please subscribe and if you have any thoughts or feelings drop us a comment!  

Drip irrigation the best watering method, farming Botswana

Recently i visited a farm where they just introduced drip irrigation, and i have to say i was amazed, the speed the crops grew was almost doubled in comparison to the sprinkler method that they were using before also there was way less water wasted. With a sprinkler method only a very small amount of water reachs the roots of the plant also water go,s all over the leaves of the crops which causes disease and rot, however with the drip method the water is directed right at the roots of the plant, hence using less water and preventing disease. Really if you can afford drip irrigation go for it, it is amazing, you will save water your crops will grow faster and you will have less disease,

Cabbage growing using drip irrigation 

The dangers of using chicken manure, Botswana farming

Todays post is about the dangers of using chicken manure when vegetable farming,
As farmers we know the high value of chicken manure in soil preparation so i am not going to tell you things that you already know.

However here is a little warning that we often over look, and that is that chicken's are famous for being carriers of mites, and some of these mites can attack plants, and of course this is not a good thing, in particular red spider mites, in fact often when you open a sack of chicken manure you can see these little mites crawling all over the place!

What can you do to avoid these mites?

Well first you could just stop using chicken manure or some farmers process there chicken manure by soaking it in huge drums of water, thus drowning all the mites and then mixing the soaked manure into there compost heap.

Well that was the Botswana farming tip for today, i hope you found it helpful!  If you did please subscribe of follow
More tips will be up next Monday
Thanks for reading

Botswana Cabbage growing tips part 1

Farming cabbages in Botswana has it own set of rules. One of the greatest challenges to Botswana cabbage farmers is the heat. When it comes to growing cabbages a farmer wants plenty of sun light at least six hours yet he does not want extreme heat as this sucks the water out of the grownd leaving the cabbage field looking like a vegetable compost heap. So what's to be done about this? Well one thing you want to do is to slow down the amount of water that is lost by evaporation each day. So the more sandy the soil the quicker the water will evaporate so in order to slow this down, before a farmer plants out his crops about a month before he will inrich his field with as much organic mulch as possible, Some mulching ideas are....
Cow dung
Goat dung
Old leaves
Old grass cuttings
Elephant dung is great if you can find it ko kasane

To find out why growing cabbages in Botswana is a great idea click Here
And you can now read part two Here

Make money small scale farming in Botswana, part 2

One of the greatest secrets of making money with a small scale farming enterprise, is to keep your overheads down and start producing produce as soon as possible. So lets take a brief look at how we can do just that. First of all,count the cost,this is just common sense yet it is amazing how many new farmers fail at this. So lets say as an example,farmer X wants to farm tomatoes. He should at the least do the following exercise. Costs Land what is the cost of the rent or if he owns the land what is the cost of the fencing or security Water what is the cost of water,this could include petrol for the pump Staff do i need staff? and how much will it cost me, Any expense should be included in his budget then since most crops take 90 days to harvest he should times his expected expenses by three months. That sum should be in the bank before even one seed is planted! So how to cut costs? Well one way to cut costs is to cut time! So how do we cut time? Well lets say our crops will take 90 days to harvest. You could cut a whole 30 days by planting your crops in seed trays at your house. That means that for your first month you can save on staff costs water costs at the farm and your crops will be much stronger when done in trays. Second we want to start making money as soon as possible so while we wait out our 90days for our main crop to mature.why not plant a second crop like rape, harvests in around 60 days and although it may not make as much money as your main crop it will help cover the costs.

Make money small scale Farming in Botswana Part 1

Make money small scale Farming in Botswana

The first step to take when farming with making money in view is to consider your markets that you will be supplying. Because it is of no value to grow thousands of hectares of fresh produce if you don’t have a market, so take a look at the market before you start planting.

For example

1 super market’s (Tomatoes carrots Cabbages Green peppers) go talk to all manages of the shops and find out what they wish to source locally.   

2 local markets (spinach rape tomatoes butter nut cabbages)

3 safari lodges (much the same as super markets but of high quality)

Then you want to consider the quantity.

For example super markets are not interested in ten bags of tomatoes they will be looking for twenty bags a week so always keep in mind you need to have Consistency - quantity and quality    

Well that’s all for part one for questions please leave a comment