COPIOUS HARVESTS LTD

People in the Zombo district suffer from high levels of poverty, with many households can barely afford a meal per day. The peasant farmers lack enough disposable incomes to support their families with good education, feeding, and decent accommodation. The whole district has very few iron-roofed houses, as the majority are grass-thatched huts.

Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2018 report further states that 92.7% of the population is below senior four qualifications. In 2021, it was reported that over 4100 girls got pregnant because many children could not go to school and were redundant. The farmers in this region resort to farming coffee as a major cash crop. However, little has improved as they suffer from poor crop yields and lack of a proper market since they lack the disposable income to buy good farm inputs and seeds.

We offer high-quality, affordable coffee seedlings, free pulping services for the coffee farmers’ produce, training and consultation, plus a fair price for their products. We raise our coffee from a well-researched variety thanks to our technical officers and in partnership with government laboratories. Furthermore, we germinate the seedlings graft with palatable coffee that is high yielding and pest resistant that we sell at a low cost. The free pulping services we give to coffee farmers are done to motivate farmers to add value to their coffee. For example, pulped coffee goes between 7,500-8,500shs, and the cherries farmers sell directly from the garden, which farmers sell 1,700-2,000shs a kilogram. This at least enables farmers to earn higher revenue from the coffee pulped than selling it directly from their garden in cherry form. The husks generated in the pulping process are decomposed into fertilizers used in the farm and coffee seed-beds to encourage the growth of 100% of organically grown coffee. We work with these peasant farmers as our coffee agents. For example, this coffee season, we partnered with five farmers to act as middlemen staged at the different trading centers to help buy coffee on our behalf and connect us with other farmers in different areas that have coffee. We also train farmers on better agronomist practices, which is done through hands-on training on the farm.

The current Coffee producing companies are profit-oriented. They determine the buying price for the peasant farmers. They also charge highly for the pulping service they offer to the farmers for one basin of coffee cherries. Not only that, but they will take 10 cups as a pulping fee, while we offer free pulping services in the area to enable coffee farmers to add value to their coffee. During pulping, coffee husks are produced, which decompose to generate organic manure that we apply as fertilizers in the coffee nursery bed to grow 100% organically grown seedlings.