GFAR blog

YAP Proposal #45: “Soybean Value Addition” (Ronald Denye, Uganda)

Soybean

I am Ronald Denye, 29 years old, from Uganda. I do agriculture as business innovatively, and Information Technology (IT) by profession and also an agripreneur.

My project is to add value to Soybean before reaching targeted market. Soybean growing as project is done in the districts of Kiboga and Kyankwanzi part of central Uganda.

From our study, the product has a lot of values to support the community for example crop supports natural soil fertility, high nutrients prevent malnutrition in people, its on high demand, used for making feeds among others including food security in most homes.

The soybean season outputs from farmers range from 29691 – 40,000 kgs depending on the favor of conditions from natural hazards to government policies or stakeholder involvement.

Soybean has two varieties grown, mark soy2n and mark soy3n and each has different requirement during the harvesting and marketing to the clients and k3 takes it all because its easy to be handled by farmers and fetches a bit higher price when ready.

I will achieve this by Farmer Multilevel Leadership (FML) where by will appoint farmer leaders who will be trained with knowledge need to do the value chain handling monitoring the crops from inputs to post harvesting through other area farmers. I will do also supervision, provision of drying materials and extension services towards real market.

Soybean1

Identified the two types of Soybean 2n and 3n which are doing well in the area. Just trying to find out the soil components to other areas by some students from Makerere University which maybe future expansion. Farmers are ready to provide more land / cultivate more acres as long as they fetch high price for the produce and want to work on sustainable value addition giving them win-win situation.

The success of the project will be measured on differences in the farmers and communities around when we get provision of employment on value chain, increased knowledge of stakeholders, quantity and quality of the product through post harvest handling, making M.O.Us with the highly paying market to sell the product and increased social–economic status.

The funds will be divided in phases according to value chain of the product (Soybean) from input to post harvesting.

Phase one:
Time frame: 2 month – Amount $2300
Activity: Farmer and land preparations, database arrangement (Number of farmers, acres to be cultivated and season), Seed Mobilization.

Phase two:
Time frame: 1 month – Amount $1200
Activity: Capacity building to farmer leaders, Seed distribution, structure implementation and follow-ups

Phase three:
Time frame: 2 month – Amount $ 1500
Activity: Capacity building to Soybean checkup and post handling, provision of some materials mostly at storage areas, packaging and marketing

Blog post and pictures submitted by Ronald Denye (Uganda) – dronnie20@gmail.com

The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.


This post is published as proposal #45 of “YAP” – our “Youth Agripreneur Project”.

The first selection of the winners will be based on the number of comments, likes and views each proposal gets.

As a reader, you can support this speaker’s entry:

  • Leave a comment (question, suggestion,..) on this project in the comment field at the bottom of this page
  • Support the post by clicking the “Like” button below (only possible for those with a WordPress.com account)
  • Spread this post via your social media channels, using the hashtag: #GCARD3

Have a look at the other “YAP” proposals too!
As a donor, support young agripreneurs and sponsor this unique project. Check out the side column for our current sponsors.
“YAP” is part of the #GCARD3 process, the third Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development.

49 thoughts on “YAP Proposal #45: “Soybean Value Addition” (Ronald Denye, Uganda)”

      1. Thanks Ligia, Mal nutrition is very important and in Africa we are left behind because we believe in just sale and get income but not focused to the health of communities.

    1. The capacity building to give our farmers will begin from Product understanding, land preparation, planting guidelines like spacing etc, different stages monitoring of plant growth, leadership skills to group leaders, post harvesting and packaging / grading of the product to meet the market demand.

    1. Dear Annasolea many thanks for the reply, I will be giving farmers knowledge of the product as promising project, preparations, leadership in groups, taking care / handling the produce through its stages of growth, quantity uplift and quality control during post harvesting.

  1. Thank you Ronnie for this initiative. Indeed, farmers in Kiboga-Kyankwanzi requires soybean as an enterprise. Since they are livestock farmers, it will help them improve on their livestock farming as soybean is highly needed in feed production. Nevertheless, nutrition levels are still very low in the two districts which can be worked on by utilising soybean consumption at the household level.

    1. Thanks Richardsoybean for your strong comment indeed its true according to the situation stand and how we have to work closely with these farmers / community improving their livelihoods.

  2. Great work Ronnie, could you tell us on the the different levels the farmers will be involved and how you have the concept of value addition fixed within your working frame

    1. The farmers will be involved in all levels of product development as i called it three (3) phases and since they are the main stakeholders, have to understand it from idea composition of product, while answering questions of who, why, when and what. The concept of value addition is to upgrade the production for community / farmers change in terms of social-economic fact. As you know what has been happening when farmers don’t have the system of production can not meet the real value market and thus end up growing for home consumption and little for selling for just an immediate problem solving but not improving the homestead status which is my fight now.

    1. Its true youth will be engaged in highly on the soybean value chain because are the future replacement of old age labor in the agriculture sector. So they have to learn the indigenous knowledge and integrate it with the innovative knowledge to cover issues of community development, employment will up scaling and adding on social-economic activities after the phases.

  3. Thanks Ronnie
    This is a brilliant idea. With the structure it certainly will have an impact. More focus should be put on capacity building within areas of building social capital, financial literacy and value addition. These will provide more jobs for the farmers

    1. Dear Sylvia thanks for the comment, the line of soybean value addition am taking is the grading of improved mak soy 2n and 3n. The best market driven value addition begins form the seed, empowerment of farmers, land preparations and life cycle plant growth kin supervision to post harvesting handling for better quality and quantity assurance.

  4. Hello Ronald,
    Value addition to soybean is a very practical idea for farmers and it can contribute to household nutrition not only for sale. Good luck with the proposal

  5. Thanks Ronald, you are ready and able to do beautiful things on this world. Good work.

  6. The proposal is great! organising the farmers and leaders is even more intersting as then they can do beeter collective marketing from such attachments which will bring even bigger revenue

  7. Great job! The connection created between the benefits of growing soybean, farmer involvement and training and the success of the project offers relevant details for getting the needed support.

    1. Thanks Niiankrah for your comment it keeps pushing me with my vision to see that farmers enjoy what they do and can improve on their livelihoods at large scale.

  8. Roonie
    great initiative, however more attention be given to value addition especialy
    converting the soybeans into powder . This will ensure a steady market
    and more money for farmers.

  9. that’s a good proposal, however I have a question and a view.
    How many people do you employ or plan to employ? and have you tried to apply for the youth livery hood funds from the district up to national level under the ministry of gender & labour.

    then I think their other proto type of the same project in the region, have you consulted them to understand the challenges and improvements needed to increase production as well as producing good yields.

  10. Let me first thanks you Saddam for the good question, we have seen some farmers in the area where the project is going to be but need to have registration of them into database to know the following, farmers number, ladies, youth involved, acres given for good planing purposes. Have tried the livelihood funds but its not accessible if its their then to only named few.
    I have tried to consult some members and all challenges needs support and i do believe when i get this will be my beginning to have the vision of eradicating poverty in the youth and communities around.

  11. Great Initiative….. add information on the value chain for marketing of soybeans to include the nutrition benefits for children. The use of soybean in fortified foods has a lot of nutritional benefits, and resultant ………more money for farmers.

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s