Amelia Agro Farm is a true Experience Center for anyone interested in agriculture, both professionals and home farmers as well as smallholders and subsistence farmers. We are implementing our own interpretation of what is commonly called permaculture. We have developed a unique system of integrating horticulture and animal husbandry, combined with forestry and horticulture on raised beds.
Typically all elements within the farm are circularly connected and enhancing each other. What remains as a waste from one process, is used as input for the next. All this is done through looking out for delivering agro industrial by- and waste products into our farm for further processing into animal feeds and soil amendments. We also bring significant volumes of brewery by-products, sugar industry waste and aquatic weeds from the Nile to boost the volumes of the multiple business units within the farm.
In summary the pillars into which the farm operations can be divided into:
- Horticulture within permaculture/regenerative farming setting
- Fodder trees & crops
- Animal Husbandry & Aquaculture, including tiled slaughterhouse & processing kitchen
- Animal Feeds production from aquatic weeds & agrifood by-products
- Crop Protection & Liquid Fertiliser production from farm waste & by-products
- Solid Fertiliser production from brown and green farm waste, supplemented by externally sourced agrifood waste products
Below is a look out into our farm and we are sure you will not go away without getting any learning experience among the many animals we rear at Amelia Farm and how we reuse their waste.
Rabbits and Goats. These are not only for their meat but mostly wanted for its special urine and droppings. These are high-value inputs for the horticultural department, who uses the urine as ingredient for the crop protection concoctions that we produce in-house. Another important section you would not love to miss is the goats section which is steadily increasing in production. These also produce highly appreciated droppings, which, once digested in the vermicompost unit, becomes an important ingredient for the formulation of the substrate in vegetable and tree seedling nursery.
Pigs, These we call them “money maker” and are at the center of our farm, not only from a revenue perspective, but also for the big volumes of dung which is prefermented and mixed with bagasse, as bulk NPK ingredient for the conventional decomposing, using the traditional winrow system where watering and aeration support the bacterias and heat production, turning waste into valuable soil. We source carbon from a local paper factory and mix that with the almost ready compost where it serves as biochar, an acidity corrector and perfect soil improver and microbial soil life enhancer.
Dairy Cows: This is one other section we are passionate about. Not for only its milk but for the dung which we so much use in the digestion of the larvae and maggots of the Black Soldier Flies. In our farm we manage the entire life cycle of the BSF, from hatching and egg laying till outgrowing into maggots and maturing into pupae. About 20% of the maggots is used for the pupae production. The balance is feed to our chickens and the Tilapia which we grow in two fish ponds. The empty keratin hulls of the pupa are milled and mixed into the nursery substrate where it serves as protection against nematodes.
Aquaculture and Poultry: Lastly we have constructed one other holistic ecosystem, where chickens live in a chicken house that we have built above one of the fish ponds. The droppings fall directly into the water and are a continuous feed stream for the cat fish that we rear in that pond. The water is very fertile because of the fish and chicken droppings, which make the water hyacinth in the pond grow nicely. We harvest the excess of the aquatic weed, cut and dry it and mix it with other dry ingredients to be eaten by our chickens. And that closes the circle.
The above is describing the processing and circularity of the farm. Obviously most of the space is occupied by a banana plantation, vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices which we grow under strict organic conditions. This is later on taken to our restaurant VeVeKaz HotPot making it a Farm To Fork Agenda. As well as to the other high end restaurants in town who truly appreciate our food safe and taste produce.
When we started the soil preparations we realised that the soil conditions where prohibitive for many crops. Soil tests have indicated low nitrogen levels, elevated salinity and above all rather high acidity. Also the potassium levels being a limiting factor. The soil was sticky, mud during rains and not holding any moisture during dry periods. The steep learning curve on how to rejuvenate and regenerate the soils is now embedded in our core objective: provided the visitors to Amelia Farm to experience a low-cost yet scalable approach in reversing the soil degradation that is since 50 years the root cause of the rising poverty in the Busoga Kingdom region. Today the soils are fertile and yields have increased multiple times. Since healthy soils result in healthy plants that are self-repellent, Amelia Farm has been able to continue our organic status and refrain from applying any inorganic pest control on any of the vegetation. The selection of the crops, rotation and push&pull system further controls the abundance of rodent insects. At the same time the biodiversity has been the major winner, many beautiful flies and birds can be seen. Our in-house made foliar fertiliser protects the plants without killing any insect and feeds the soil and plants at the same time with more of the trace elements, required for the plants to grow and produce healthy crops.
Within the farm there are several units where we focus on agroforestry, interplanting timber trees with bananas and other crops like dragon fruits, pineapples and vanilla. Nitrogen fixing is here through permanent cover vegetation like creeping ground nuts. And of course through the underground root systems of the nitrogen fixing Giant Lira (Melia volkensii), a native fast growing tree and Glericidia which we use to support our vanilla vines. We mulch the young plants and seedlings as protection against dehydration with bagasse, a woody left-over of the sugar cane industry and a perfect support in the regeneration of the soils. Several areas of the farm are feed forests, where we grow crops like Moringa, Mulberry and Banagrass that feed our animals and keep them in a healthy condition.
The massively increased organic matter content of the soils in Amelia Farm is not only supporting increased soil fertility. It also has drastically changed the soil characteristics. Whereas they were sticky and clumpy when we started, today the pH is neutral and the soils nicely crumbling. Moisture retention on dry days has increased and water clogging after rains is now much less affecting the plants.
In our efforts to support the communities around the farm and spread the gospel of permaculture and agroforestry to any interested farmer, Amelia Agro also operates a nursery where we grow seedlings of vegetables and trees. More and more Amelia Farm develops into an aggregation center where outgrowers are trained in our approach, where they buy their inputs and seedlings and after harvesting find a fair and secured market for their crops.