Help us plant 15,160 trees before the end of 2024.
If you are reading this, we are asking you to help the UCF plant 5,160 fruit trees and 10,000 shrubs before the end of 2024. The environmental impact that these trees will have will be very small. But they will have quite an impact in our fight against poverty.
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Our region Busoga, in eastern Uganda, is Uganda’s most impoverished. The Uganda Community Farm (the UCF), a nonprofit social enterprise, is running a project that trains rural poor farmers in Kamuli & Buyende on white sorghum; provides them with initial inputs (seed, tarpaulins, spray pumps etc), and then at harvest, we pool these farmers’ sorghum and find a big buyer.
Our new goal right now, is to put the UCF’s own 12 acres of land to maximum use, to ensure that 100% of our administrative costs (staff salaries, fuel for field visits etc) are covered by the UCF itself, i.e. from the income on our 12 acres.
For this reason, the UCF wants to plant 4 acres of the Wambugu apples from Kenya, which happen to be among the best performing tropical apple varieties in Africa (here is a video of a young Ugandan farmer who was already harvesting his Wambugu apples only two years from the time of planting). We also want to plant two acres of the locally-adapted Anna and Golden Dorsett apples from the Uganda government institute Muzardi, and one acre of pomegranates.
Because the apples are all dwarf varieties, we will use a spacing of 7ft x 7ft, so we will have 800 trees per acre. For pomegranates, we will use 10ft x 13 ft, so we will have 360 in an acre. Also, because these are fruit trees, their seedlings cost a little more than ordinary trees, but their social impact is also bigger than that of ordinary trees.
Wambugu Apples Kenya sells their seedlings at $10 a tree, but because we want many seedlings, they have offered to give us at $9 each, with free shipping to Uganda. So, the 3,200 seedlings for four acres will cost $28,800. The Uganda government institute Muzardi sells their Anna, Golden Dorsett and pomegranate seedlings at Ugx 10,000 (or $2.8) each, so the 1600 seedlings for two acres will cost $4,480, and the 360 pomegranates will cost $1,008. Total: $34,288.
Lastly, we also want to plant 10,000 Kei-Apple trees (a shrub) as a live fence to give protection to our fruit trees. Each Kei-Apple seedling costs Ugx 500 ($0.14), so the 10,000 shrubs will only cost $1,400, bringing the total cost to $35,688 for 15,160 trees.
Help us make a small impact on the environment, while building a self-sustainable path from ultra poverty. Note: the 15,160 trees that we are aiming to plant are part of our project “12 for 100% ADMIN self-sufficiency” which you can learn about here.
How you can help:
Recruit your friends and create a small GoFundMe on our behalf, to help us raise the needed $35,688. Or make a contribution via any of the ways mentioned on this page.
We would be very grateful if you could help us do this. For any questions, please contact UCF founder Anthony on anthony AT ugandafarm.org (written May 2024).