Kilimanjaro, TZ – Family demonstrates continuous quality improvement – 1 June 2015

The BMM Family started their garden with Lishe Bora in October, 2013. Over the past year and a half the family has demonstrated continuous quality improvement and self-sufficiency, and they are reaping the rewards of those efforts every day.

Mr. and Mrs. BMM are assisted by an impressive workforce: their 12 children! Their youngest child is just two months old. “Now we have a substitute for our soccer team,” Mr. BMM jokes. He says he plans to have 15 children.

Since starting their garden the family has worked to learn the processes of sustainable organic agriculture. They have learned to make their own seedlings, to use manure and mulch from their own farm as soil top-dressing, to replant beds, and to build new beds and expand their garden. The BMM family even does their own sales and marketing. They live on a hill far away from the other Lishe Bora gardens. This has allowed them to be the supplier of choice for other families living on the hill. They get customers coming to their farm on a daily basis to buy vegetables and pay a premium because otherwise they will have to walk a long distance to the market.

On average the family sells 5,000 TZS (US $2.63) per week and on their most productive weeks the family has sold 15,000 TZS (US $7.89). They use this money to buy household goods like soap and cooking oil, to pay the water bill for their garden and livestock, and to buy meat for holidays. They also eat vegetables regularly and Mr. and Mrs. BMM estimate they eat around 20,000 TZS (US $10.52) per month. They used to only eat vegetables during the two months of the year when they were easy to grow, now they enjoy them all year round.

The family’s garden achievements have contributed to achievements in other parts of their life as well. Income and savings from the garden, coupled with the parents’ determination, have enabled the family to invest in home improvements and livestock. When they started their garden they had one cow, two goats, and a few chickens. Now the families has three cows, four goats, and 16 chickens. The cows produce a combined 8 liters of milk per day, which brings the family an additional 6,400 TZS (US $3.37) per day. They have replaced the mud walls of their house with wood siding and improved an open-air banda to be an enclosed room their children can sleep in. Garden income did not pay for all of these improvements, but the family explains that it did help them begin thinking about how to use their land more effectively.

Before starting a garden the family had a small banana and coffee farm like most other families in the area. The father worked as a day laborer for the church and for local farmers who needed help planting and cultivating during the planting season. The family did not think of their land as an income source. The garden made them excited about how they could make additional income by getting more out of their land than commodity cash crops.

In the coming months Mr. and Mrs. BMM hope to expand their garden. They have already added additional beds around the perimeter of the garden, and now they want to expand their fence so they can have 24 garden beds – twice the usual garden size. They hope to use the additional beds as income beds and send those vegetables to the market if their neighbors don’t buy them all.