Arlindo Jose Victorino raises about 9,800 chickens on his farm in Nampula Province, Mozambique. To care for this flock, Arlindo and his family have historically had to collect up to 3,500 liters of water each day – walking a one-way distance of 660 meters from their chicken coops – using 25 liter containers.
Do the math on that and you’ll find they were walking about 184 kilometers (that’s about 115 miles) per day. That’s a lot of time and energy spent on the single task of getting water. And there are many other farmers in the area facing the same situation.
To help get more water where it needs to go faster, Cargill recently donated hippo rollers to 200 farmers in Nampula Province, including Arlindo, who supply the company’s customer, New Horizons Mozambique.
These rollers, designed in Africa, allow people to collect, transport and store five times more water than a single bucket by simply rolling them along the ground. The savings in time and energy, as well as the positive social impact, are far reaching.
For example, using a hippo roller will reduce Arlindo’s family’s daily walk by more than 73 percent to about 51 kilometers (around 32 miles). This gives him the opportunity to consider increasing the number of chickens his farm produces.
“We are proud to support this community where our customer, New Horizons Mozambique, is making a difference in people’s lives by providing a viable poultry supply chain for the local market,” said Pieter Reichert, general manager of Cargill Mozambique.
“These 200 hippo rollers will vastly improve the farmers’ efficiency and will hopefully stimulate an increase in their production rates. Working together with smallholder farmers and our commercial partners can help this community and others in Mozambique thrive,” he said.
Andrew Cunningham, CEO of New Horizons Mozambique, noted the impact the hippo rollers will have on farmers’ ability to upscale production as well as their quality of life.
“We have been pleased to work with Cargill for a few years now in the sourcing of maize and soya which are a huge part of our feed requirements,” said Cunningham. “It is a real pleasure to be able to take this partnership to a new level in the supply of these hippo rollers to our grower community.”
For farmers like Arlindo, the equation is simple. Less walking plus more rolling equals better productivity. And that adds up to success for everyone involved.
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(This appeared in Forbes)