Riding around with a local vet

Hey Guys!

After our first week in the Mbarara area, we were sent out to Rubaare. In this area, we would be riding around with a local vet. There is a cooperative of twenty farmers here that works with SNV, and we would also visit all of these farms in the next 3 weeks. In doing so, we would learn all about the challenges they are facing, and try to come up with some constructive solutions to the issues. 

In general, we would visit farms in the mornings and keep the afternoons open for emergencies. We also decided to institute some 'afternoon rounds' where we discussed a topic that Kwesiga (the local vet) wanted to learn more about. This was followed by palpating a few cows, because he also wanted to learn how to do pregnancy diagnosis. All in a day's work! 

Jared and Kwesiga sitting in the grass together, looking too damn cute. Kwesiga does a little bit of everything as a vet in this rural area, but his specialty is dairy cows. 

On the far left is Warren, he is our driver and has been seeing us safely all over the Ugandan countryside. He has his work cut out for him. The roads are sometimes no better than a goat trail, and we go off-roading for most of the day, just to get from farm to farm. There are no grid roads here, nature abhors a straight line in Uganda.

A lot of cows are just milked like this, with their back legs tied together just above the hock. The calf is gently batted away while the milker takes his share. Usually the calves are pastured separately, and brought to each individual cow at milking time. This stimulates the cow to release her milk, and the calf gets the remainder when the milker is done. 

I like to call this photo the honeymoon shot- this is Jared and I deworming the same cow at once, while one of the farm hands holds her head. Most of the Ugandans think we are totally crazy when I tell them we are on our honeymoon. 

The Ankole cow, a native breed to this region. Prized for their horns, they are incredibly calm. What they lack in milk production they make up for in resistance to local diseases. And those horns are amazing!

This man asked me if one of his sons could marry any of my sisters. I had to disappoint him and inform him they were both already married. He settled for a picture instead. Since this incident, I have been asked the same question again by another old man. Rosie and Jocy, if you only knew how in demand you were here. 

Kwesiga doing some castrations. It was ridiculously hot this day, I was hiding under a bush for half of them.

This is where we are staying. It has some beautiful views over the valley. It is an insanely bumpy half hour journey to town. 

Another view of our place for the month

This herd of cows lives just above us on the hill

Here we are administering diminazene and oxytetracycline to one farmer's herd. This is given once every 3 months for prevention of trypanosomiasis. This is the causative agent of 'sleeping sickness' in humans. In cattle, it more so manifests with diarrhea and ill thrift. 

We have also been doing a lot of drenching with dewormers here. 

For cattle and goats alike!

Here is Jared doing a palpation lab with Kwesiga. The cows here are all super calm, which is good because the handling facilities rely heavily on calm temperaments. 

The boys at the farm were really jealous that all the grown ups were getting to stick their arms in the cow's butts. So we gave them each a crack at it. 

Since we are coming to this farm so often to do palpation practice, we have gotten to know Emma and Honest quite well. They are two super fun, energetic little boys that spend a lot of time out with the cows. 

Here they are milking 'their cow.' Emma was also trying to palpate her, too. 

I figured if small children were milking cows that I might as well give it a try. I certainly wasn't winning any speed contests. 

We have met a lot of lovely Ugandans so far, and posed for a lot of pictures. 

We have been having a great experience so far. Uganda is an interesting place to raise dairy cows. There are totally different problems here because it is a tropical country. We have been brushing up on all of these wild and wonderful conditions as we bump along the road with Kwesiga. 

Until Next Time! 

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park

Hey Guys,

One of the big ticket items of trip had already arrived- our gorilla tracking! We did this in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Doesn't that name just evoke thoughts about a steamy, lush, exotic jungle? Just me? Ok, well we were lucky to already be in the south west area of Uganda, so it wasn't too far to get to Kabale town and then to our hostel out in the National Park. 

This was the view over the edge of the balcony, looking out on the forest of Bwindi. Within those trees are the mountain gorillas, the whole reason we have come here. Mountain gorillas are critically endangered by IUCN's Red List. There are only about 800 left in the world, living in two remaining groups. The first group has about 400, living here in Bwindi. The rest are in Volcanoes NP (Rwanda) and the Virungas (DR of Congo).

This is us starting the trek, through some very thick and lush jungle. 

We found some bee's honeycomb along the way. The 'Twa people, who were forest pygmies, used to live in Bwindi and subsist on the forest alone. They harvested honey by climbing way up into the trees. There are no Twa people in the park anymore, they have all moved into the villages. 

This is the morning glory vine and flower. This is a big part of the gorilla's vegetarian diet. 

After walking for about 2 hours, we came across the gorillas! There were three trackers that went ahead of us, and they stay with the gorillas all day to see where they go to sleep. This makes it easier for them to find them the next morning. They keep a low profile while tracking them, and as tourists we are only allowed to be near them for one hour. At all times, a distance of 7 m or more must be maintained (unless they approach you!) 

This is mucunguzi, the silverback of the group. In the local language, this word means 'saviour.'

He was right there! It was so amazing.

At one point in the tracking, we saw Mucunguzi lean back against a tree and look up, scoping out the canpoy. What we didn't realize was that he was getting ready to climb a tree. All of a sudden he walked RIGHT by us and scaled the tree with incredible ease. Fruits started dropping all over the forest floor, and then he took a huge pee! Luckily none of us were directly underneath. 

One of the fruits they like to eat

Here we are with the two other people on our tour. We are laughing because we were trying to get organized for a selfie, and the second we were all in position the Silverback decided he was outta there! We had asked to do a trek with lots of walking, and this was so great because we only got paired up with 2 other people. Some groups had 8. So we had a much more intimate experience. It also helped that these two ladies from Barcelona were absolutely lovely, and let us refresh our bad Spanish with them for hours.

What a great day! We walked back out of the jungle, and at the bottom there was a group of local ladies that gave us a great dance to celebrate our successful tracking.

The tea plantations along the road are so beautiful here, a really vibrant shade of green. This little boy was very shy, but his brother told me he wanted to be in the picture. 

Until Next Time!

Starting our placement with Vets Without Borders

Hey Guys!

After getting over some jet lag, we settled into the first week of our placement in south west Uganda, starting from Mbarara. The first week was devoted to touring three different farms that serve as practical dairy training farms (PDTFs). These farms have partnered with SNV to deliver high quality training and information sharing to the local Ugandan dairy farmers. They are a great resource for continuing education, even after the farmers have completed their training. As Vets Without Borders (VWB) volunteers, we will work closely with SNV staff, as they are the on-the-ground partner. 

Each farm has developed an area of specialty. Our first tour was to AGID Dairy farm. It was a beautiful first farm to visit, set on top of the hill with great views all around. Their pastures were in great shape and the cattle looked good. 

 Here we met a team of four trainers and the manager. They told us all about pasture and forage management in the Ugandan system. Nutrition is their area of expertise. All the farms we have encountered so far have made extensive grazing their model. Some are using silage to supplement them through the two annual dry seasons they have, but even this is not widely practiced. In the pictures below, I talk through how they prepare and preserve silage. It is radically different from home, because they don't have the infrastructure and heavy equipment we are so fortunate to call the norm. 

Here is a crew of workers putting up silage. They harvested it by hand with pangas (hand-held knives), chopped it, and loaded it into the bed of a truck. 

Here is a small-scale chopper that runs on 'man power'

Then the chopped silage is dumped at the silage site, where more people drag it down the long stretch of trench that they had already dug (by hand!) and covered with plastic. They roll a 50 gallon drum over the chopped silage to flatten everything down and get as much air out as possible. Then they cover it with silage plastic before shoveling dirt over the whole thing. 

Here we are standing in front of a covered silage pile with the trainers, discussing the process of silaging

They opened up a silage pile for us to look at the face. 

After that, we headed to the hay shed. These are baling boxes. They lay a few strings down horizontally, stuff the box with hay, tie the strings and Voila- you have yourself a small square bale.

This is a round baler on my right. The green trailer carries the forage or grass they need to transport around the farm, and the slasher in the foreground cuts forages for someone to then pick up manually and load in the trailer. This picture was taken at the second training farm we visited, which was called M'tanoga. Their specialty was animal health, and they had the most robust vaccination program we came across in Uganda. They are vaccinating regularly for blackleg, anthrax, East Coast fever, and brucellosis. They vaccinate based on outbreaks for lumpy skin disease and foot and mouth disease. They are also treating prophylactically every three months for trypanosomiasis and spraying once weekly for ticks. That might seem like a lot, but it is barely enough to keep the ticks at bay, which carry anaplasmosis, babesiosis, heartwater and East Coast fever.   

This is a spray race that the cattle walk down once a week to be sprayed for ticks. There are nozzles inside the small hut which spray their entire bodies

While we are on the subject of ticks, this is a good time to talk about eyes. Before this trip, those two things wouldn't have connected in my brain, but since arriving here in Uganda we have come to learn more about these fascinating tropical diseases. There is a syndrome of 'cattle blindness' going on in the dairy herds, and it is yet to be totally described. We have seen all sorts of bizarre eye lesions on cows. Here is a cow with cataracts, something I had never seen before. When you look online to try to find information on bovine cataracts, all you get are some random case studies of a herd of Ayrshire with congenital cataracts. However, there is something more to it here. We have seen corneal edema, ulcers, hypopyon, hyphema, cataracts, and blindness in an apparently normal eye. We have heard theories from other vets in the area- genetic, infectious (East Coast fever, Moraxella bovis). At this point, the full explanation evades us. What is tragic about the situation is that some herds have over 1/3 of the animals affected! That is a lot of blind cows. In the meantime, we are recommending that farmers do everything they can to manage the threat of ticks on their farms and promptly treat all eyes showing signs of active infection. 

This poor cow has hypopyon (pus within the eye) 

Here is a motorbike with milk canisters strapped to the back of it. 

I like this picture because I managed to catch a motorbike with milk canisters and the milk truck heading in the opposite direction. I was shocked to learn that most of the milk produced in Uganda is milked by hand. Over 80% of the milk comes from small scale dairy farmers that ship less than 50 L of milk per day, so this is how they get their milk to the collecting facilities. Are you starting to see how labor intensive everything is here? 

An early morning shot of the hazy, humid mornings we are having here in Uganda.

This chalkboard was from M'tanoga, and it helped them keep track of which cows to dry off, who was calving soon, etc. Record keeping is something that needs to be stressed here in Uganda, and we are trying to encourage farmers to use this tool to better understand what is happening on their farms.

This chalkboard kept track of who was milking, and how much. On the training farms, where performance is the best in the country, cows are peaking around 20 L per day. This is in contrast to the indigenous breed, Ankole, which milks about 2 L per day for around 200 days of lactation.  Ankoles have the advantage of being immune to many of the local diseases (especially tick-borne). Many farmers are trying to capture the immunity of the indigenous breeds with the milk production of improved dairy breeds (Holstein, Jersey, etc) in a hybrid cow. This work is ongoing. 

This is the milking parlor and calf barn at AGID. I was super impressed to see how clean everything was. Cleaning might be seen as something that takes work, but so does everything else here, so they are not afraid to scrub calf bottles and buckets. Water troughs were so clean a human could drink out of them. They are also trying to set the best example possible for when farmers come to the training farms, so they set a high standard.  

We also walked through the cows and looked at the various species of grasses and legumes in the field. It has been a bit of a crash course for me, learning all the new species out here in the Tropics.

Luckily there are demonstration gardens at all the training farms, with handy little labels. This was the only crop I recognized, alfalfa! Here they call it Lucerne. 

This dugout at the bottom of the hill at M'Tanoga holds water for the entire farm. They use solar power to pump the water up the hill into the water troughs. This was an initiative rolled out by SNV, and they have done a cost-sharing program with many farms in South West Uganda to provide accessible drinking water to cattle. Heat stress is a big factor here, and if cows can walk a short distance to water in the heat of the day, it makes a big difference. 

Welcome to MARS- Mobile Animal Residue System. These pens are moved every 2 days, evenly distributing the waste and chewing down the grass at the same time. It also decreases pathogen transfer, as they get a fresh start every 2 days. 

This is a methane biodigester. Manure is added in slurry form, and encased in this long plastic tube. As the methane is produced, it is gassed off into the hose at the top, which travels into the building on the right which is used like propane for cooking. This biodigester powers the yoghurt factory at M'Tanoga, made with milk from the farm. 

Some students presenting a mock budget for their first year of farming. One of the big messages the trainers are trying to send is that farming is a business- outputs need to exceed inputs. This exercise helped the students realize the cost of everything, and that larger purchases need to be worked towards. 

The third and final training farm we visited was Rubyerwa. It is owned by a woman named Philomena Nshangano, and I am pictured with her below. She is a great role model for women to see that they too could run a successful dairy. Though integral to the running of many farms, women and youth play a side role in Uganda. One of the missions of both VWB and SNV is to bring these important people to the discussion tables where their voices can be heard. There is a great article here on Philomena if you are interested: https://snv.org/update/thriving-male-dominated-sector-meet-philomena-model-dairy-farmer

We toured around Rubyerwa, which specializes in animal reproduction, breeding and genetics. Philomena is using exclusively AI breeding, and she imports semen from around the world. 

Cows are comfortable in the milking parlour

Canisters laid out to be filled with milk. Each canister holds 50 L, so a lot of farmers would have just one to fill each milking. 

These are paper records of the cow's milk production at Rubyerwa. Philomena designed these notebooks, and sells them to interested farmers that want to keep track of how much each cow is milking. It's DairyComp in a book! 

Each calf had it's important information written on a chalk board above it's head. We were very impressed with how clean and healthy the calves were. There was excellent ventilation, and her rates of calf-hood illness were extremely low. 

While at this farm, we made a plan with Philomena to hold a palpation practical, as there was interest in learning how to diagnose pregnancies with rectal palpation. We did a bit of theory in the classroom before heading out to the best teachers of all, the cows. 

Jared explaining some anatomy 

Here we are getting down to business. I was really impressed by how quickly the herdsmen were picking it up. I barely found the cervix in my first palpation lab. 

Posing for a picture at the end of the lab. Everyone on the truck was headed out to the fields to chop and load silage, before trucking it back to the silage pit. 

This is an awesome picture Jared snapped one misty morning before we drove into one of the training farms. The Ankole cow has absolutely massive horns, and they are a sign of prestige in Ugandan society. Some rich people have a herd of 20-30 of them solely for the status symbol. 

Thank you for your patience, this turned into a bit of a long one!

Until Next Time!