Dave's East Africa Blog: Day 12 Busia May 20, 2011

Greetings from Busia

This morning Ben was very prompt and picked me up in Kakamega for an hour’s journey to Busia the main border town to Uganda. Pastor Dave from Huruma in Nairobi was also along. We arrived at Ben’s cousins hotel around noon checked in and had lunch.

After lunch we were off to Funyula to look at some fish farms or fish ponds. The two types of fish that are raised are tilapia and catfish. Some ponds have only one type of fish per pond some ponds contained both. Most of the ponds we saw today were similar in size and are stocked with about 1000 fingerlings each. The tilapia will be ready to harvest within 8 months and their size will be between one and two pounds each. The catfish are harvested after 10 months to a year and will weigh between two and three pounds each. The fish are fed a starch and protein mixture of rice bran and very small minnows. For their vitamins they are given cow manure that is put into a crib in the pond and fosters algae growth. Each fingerling costs 10 Ksh (80 Ksh = $1) and can be sold for up 100 Ksh per pound. The tilapia will bring in on average about 150 Ksh per fish and the catfish about 200 Ksh. It takes about 10 men 10 days to dig a pond. Each pond is near a creek to supply it with water and to drain it once it is time to harvest. The main challenges these farms have are the birds, monitor lizards, and flooding of the creek. When the creek over flows and breaches the ponds some of the fish will end up being washed out.

Within Ben’s council district around his home in Funyula there are about 80 fish farmers with literally hundreds of ponds all along the same creek. Some farmers have two or three ponds some have six to eight ponds. The area covers about 30,000 acres of this creek channel that runs into Lake Victoria. I told Ben that I can not visit them all. Talking with some of the local farmers it did not take me very long to see that this is a great opportunity for them to pool their resources. We discussed this with some of the farmers and they agreed that this would be a good idea. I am going to think about this some more and Ben has asked me to come back and he will assemble all 80 farmers and I can speak with them about forming a cooperative to help increase their yields, leverage their buying power, train each other, market their fish, etc.

One farmer we stopped to talk with travels to Port Victoria every month to buy her rice bran and minnows. Port Victoria is about a 60 kilometer trip each way and she spends 1000 Ksh in transportation to purchase a 600 Ksh 50 kilogram bag of fish food. I was floored there must have been a translation issue. I asked again what she said was correct. Why can’t she buy it locally and are all the 80 farmers in the same situation? She will end up taking up to 10 percent of her harvest to pay for transportation to get fish food. Not good. I asked about feeding of the fish and I got various answers. Some give the same amount every day for the 8 months others gradually increase the amount based on the size of the fish. I asked other questions as well and it was obvious that these farmers could be making a lot more money out of each harvest.

Some of these farms are very successful some are not. I asked one guy that had 7 ponds and was about to harvest one of the catfish ponds how many he expected to get out of the pond. He told me that their had been a flood and he feels he might of lost about 200 fish. I asked him what he normally yields and he said he puts in a thousand and usually yields near there. Others are not so fortunate. We visited a 4 pond site that had been abandoned after the first harvest because a devastating flood came in and washed most of the fish away. That harvests yield was far less then the initial investment and the farmers are saving to restock the ponds. They have learned that the spot will be ok once the proper channels are dug to divert the rising creek during heavy rains. I was told that this is fairly common since all these ponds are next to or near the creek and they usually have to guess at the diversion channels that feed into and out of the ponds. These were new ponds and the investment to get them ready for the first batch is pretty costly. Once the ponds are built then it is just a matter of buying more fingerlings at 10 Ksh each and feeding them every day. There are literally hundreds more of inactive ponds from discouraged farmers. I am going to spend another day on this. To me this is a project that can use some investment in the future but right now there is no need to expand until they maximize what they already have. Each of them have a few ponds but between them all they have hundreds with the potential to have many more. They have the fish, they have the buying power, they have knowledge, they just need someone to come in and teach them how to fish. Any one care to help?

Here are some pictures of today’s outing. My battery died while I was in the field and could not take some pictures of the abandoned ponds. Thank you Ben for letting me wear a pair of your high boots. Getting to these ponds meant walking through some dense brush and mud. Not to good with tennis shoes. It also makes it harder for those pesky little Black Mamba's to bite my ankles. That comment is for my mother she is sure that I am going to get bit by one. She watched a documentary on Africa and its snake habitat. My luck is I will get bit and then she can tell me she told me so.

A typical fish pond