31 Mar 2022

Kanye South MP Dr Lemogang Kwape has parised a prominent pig farmer, Mr Tiroyaone Modise for actively preserving the spirit of self-reliance through mentoring youth in piggery businesses. 

Speaking during a youth piggery seminar at Diphatana Lands, near Kanye he said there was a need to resuscitate and preserve the principle of self-reliance for the country to attain development it aspires. 

He said that the role of government was to empower its citizens to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive world. 

Thus, he urged Batswana to be self-reliant and embrace the spirit of self-help if the country was to attain desired levels of development. 

He said given that the farmer mentored youth on site in piggery businesses using his own resources, he deserved to be applauded. 

He said the farmer identified and analysed a need in the community that enabled him to meet the youth at their point of need, adding such hard work and dedication should not go unnoticed. 

Dr Kwape who is also Minister of International Affairs and Cooperation noted that it was imperative to recognise such efforts. 

He said one could start a small business and scale up as clientele base grew as well as expand the business model through government funding and commercial banks. 

He spoke of value chain addition in agriculture, pointing that it entailed changing a raw agricultural product into something new either through packaging, processing, cooling, drying, extracting or any other type of process that differentiates the product from the original raw commodity. 

He said adding value, was as a process that changes or transforms a product from its original state to a more valuable state remained paramount in piggery farming. 

He advised youth to conduct market research on piggery so as to determine demand and supply. 

Speaking at the same occasion, the architect of piggery mentoring initiative, Mr Modise said he came up with the initiative to partake in human development more especially the youth for a better Botswana. 

He said the initiative had an advantage of diverting youth from wayward behavior and as it sought to redirect potential youthful offenders through programming, supervision, and supporting them to be entrepreneurs. 

For his part, a young pig farmer, Mr Moses George, said pigs were generally friendly animals and while every pig has a unique disposition, certain breeds tend to be a little more sociable than others. 

He said there were two main types of mating strategies; positive assortative mating and negative assortative mating of which in positive assortative mating the focus was to narrow the genetic pool so that the desired traits express themselves more frequently whereas the other mating the focus was to correct a deficiency or improve expression of a specific trait.

He said in positive assortative mating one mates the same breeds whereas in negative assortative mating one uses different types of breeds. 

He said that pigs which were of the same enclosure/parlor/pigpen were not supposed to be copulated together as they would not be reproductive, thus advising people to use a boar from a different enclosure. 

That is to say a boar and gilts or sows (female pigs) of different enclosures should be copulated during the mating selection processes. 

Additional research shows that pigs were playful, friendly, sensitive, and intelligent animals. They have long been considered smarter than dogs, and the complexity of their social lives rivals those of primates. ENDS