Determinants of income from pig farming in Uganda: a case study of Lwebitakuli Sub-County in Sembabule District

Abstract

This research paper sought to investigate the determinants of income from pig farming. A primary source of data was used and it involved administering of questionnaires to pig farmers in Lwebitakuli Sub County in Sembabule district in the central region of Uganda. The Cochran formula was used to determine the sample size of the 96 pig farmers that were to be interviewed but the response rate was at 90.6% implying that 87 pig farmers complied with answering of the questionnaires. The data from these pig farmers was entered into excel and then exported to STATA 15 where analysis was done at three levels i.e. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses Under Univariate analysis, the study revealed that majority (50.57%) of the respondents (pig farmers) kept local breeds of pigs followed by those who kept exotic breeds (33.33%) and the rest (16.09%) kept cross breeds of pigs. Majority (74.71%) of the respondents practice small scale pig farming followed by those who did it on a medium scale (17.24%) and the rest (8.046%) did pig farming on a large scale. The Study again showed that majority (60.92%) of the respondents sold their pigs through middlemen and most of them (90.80%) sold them in form of live weight instead of after value addition. It showed that the median of the expenditure on feeds of pigs by respondents was Ugshs.150000 with a range from Ugshs.20000 to Ugsh.7500000 and the median of the income earned from pig farming was Ugshs.1200000 with a range from Ugshs.150000 to Ugsh. 16,100,000. Under bivariate analysis, it was found out that there exists a significant relationship between the respondents’ type of breed kept and marketing mechanism used by the respondents and the income earned by the respondents. In addition, there was a medium positive relationship between most recent expenditure on feeds of pigs by the respondents and income earned from pig farming by the respondents. Under multivariate analysis, the income earned from pig farming by respondents was regressed against all the independent variables to form a linear regression model with p-value=0.000 was significant (p<0.05) was significant implying the model was a good fit and the R2 =0.651 indicated that 65.1% of the total variation in the dependent variable (income earned from pig farming by respondents) was explained by the independent variables. Also from this, it was significant that respondents who attained the tertiary level of education earned 2281926 more units of income. The key findings of this study show that the type of breed kept, the marketing mechanism used and expenditure on feeds of pigs actually determine the income from the pig farming activity. From this study, the research paper recommended that there should be an increase in the sensitization of the pig farmers about the significance of rearing better breeds of pigs preferably exotic breeds. Also, pig farmers are encouraged to form cooperative unions to increase their bargaining power for better prices of their pigs on the market. Lastly pig farmers can adopt value addition or market their pigs directly to urban markets to avoid exploitation by middlemen.