In the immediate region around Jinja, at the Source of the Nile, Uganda is a true Garden of Eden with excellent farming opportunities. Despite that, poverty among farmers is at historically high levels, not only because of climate change, lack of knowledge about modern farming practices and depleted soils, but certainly also because export markets for fresh produce and processing of horticultural crops are virtually non-existing.
Amelia Farms (https://ameliaagro.com/), is a centre of Excellence and Research and Development. It provides High Quality Products and Services like:
- Growing Organic Vegetables Fruits Herbs and Spices
- Production of Seeds & Seedlings
- Rearing Healthy Livestock like Goats, Cows, Poultry, Fish, Pigs & Rabbits
- Production of Healthy Animal feeds from Aquatic Weeds & Insect Proteins
- Production of High-Value Compost using waste Streams from the Farm and food industry
- Production of Liquid Fertilizers & Organic Crop Protection
The overall management and technical aspects of the agriculture and processing units are safe in the hands of Jan Willem van Es, an experienced manager and entrepreneur, who came in 2011 to Kenya and moved in 2017 to Uganda where he was recruited by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development in the position of Head of Agro Operations at Industrial Promotion Services (Uganda). That is where he saw the agricultural potential of Jinja.
It is the mission of Amelia Agro to make use of carbon emission free Cradle-2Cradle techniques in farming and to serve as an center of excellence and learning by setting the example. The important winners of this strategy are the employees and especially the soil!
Internship opportunities and extension assignments (working either locally or from the Netherlands/Belgium)
Amelia Agro Africa offers a number of internship opportunities. If possible serving as an intern at the farm in Uganda is preferable, but a number of assignments can also be executed and researched from a distance.
- Fermentation of animal feed, how, what, effect, cost, technical installation, risks, validation.
- Compiling and validating animal feed, including testing
- Development of liquid biological fertilizer made from natural ingredients,
What can we get from literature study?
How to translate to Jijna (Uganda and other countries?) - Compost making in Africa, starting in Uganda (Jinja) but also related Growpact in Kenya, Kitale (https://growpactkenya.com/)
Desk study: what is available in terms of materials?
Quantities of everything, cost price
Substances, content?
Investigate experiences of previous projects
Setting up of various compost heaps
Testing of the various compost compositions
Market exploration
Which model, sale of, or via buy back of product - Set up cultivation plan for regenerative horticulture
Desk study
Search and share experiences
Execute experiments - BSF (Black soldier fly) and worm production
Optimize current way of working
Validate what comes out, dry / fresh
Make proposals for improvement - Introduce the wecking of vegetables in Kenya and Uganda (especially products that are likely to go over the date)
Create purchase and sales plan
Wecking of vegetables and fruit
Explore opportunities to process crop surpluses into shelf-stable food and related products - Life Cycle Assessment for the compost production unit, mainly focusing on the storage of carbon/biochar in agricultural soils as a result of large scale application of BioNPK as soil improvement/fertilizer.