Farmers’ association makes over E2m
MBABANE - Through the assistance of the Regional Development Fund (RDF), a farmer’s association under Ndzingeni Constituency has managed to make over E2 million in revenue in two years.
The Ntsanjeni Farmers Association started working in 2022, and are in the feedlot business. In the past two years, they have managed to sell over 300 cattle.
Currently, they have 64 cattle of which 33 are heifers and 31 are being fattened for the market.
A feedlot, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, is a plot of land on which livestock is fattened for market.
According to the Treasurer, Musa Gama, they formed the association in 2021, but started operations in 2022.
Gama said they started with 104 cattle which they fattened for the market.
He explained that they had around 32 members and the requirement for joining was to bring four cows.
According to Gama, after they had formed the association, they approached the constituency for assistance with cow feed, medication and a truck to transport the cattle.
“We had already met the 10 per cent RDF requirement with the 104 cattle. The constituency provided us with the truck which amounted to E1.4 million, 2 160 bags of cow feed amounting to E466 584 and medication worth E10 000,” Gama said.
He added that there were no challenges experienced while making the requests as they had already provided the 10 per cent and had over 10 members.
Gama went on to explain that they wanted to build their own abattoir to lessen the costs of using other people’s establishments.
He explained that there were allegedly a lot of shady dealings in abattoirs as they were given the carcass only, without the other parts such as head, trotters and offals.
He said these were taken by the abattoirs without paying a dime.
He also shared that buying cattle from farmers was too expensive, hence they decided to have their own heifers for reproduction purposes.
“The abattoir will assist us because we now want to do everything in-house. We want to make another request for 50 heifers, to avoid going to farmers to buy cattle because they are expensive,” he said.