Serengeti Breweries Limited’s (SBL) initiatives of empowering local farmers to produce raw materials locally through technical and financial assistance are meant for meeting the brewer’s demand for various ingredients.
The SBL Corporate Relations Director John Wanyancha said recently that the company’s ambitious project facilitates farmers growing maize, sorghum and millet in various parts of the country, increasing the locally-sourced raw materials for beer production.
“To date, this project has benefited more than 400 core farmers across various regions including Arusha, Manyara, Mbeya, Kilimanjaro, Singida, Morogoro, Shinyanga and Dodoma who collectively cultivate around 20,000 acres,” he said.
Some of the beer ingredients are water, grains, hops and yeast. Cereals such as maize, millet and sorghum have been used to substitute grain requirements.
They are formidable ingredients in the beer brewing process. Fortunately, they can be grown locally and in large quantities, unlike barley widely used worldwide and supplied to SBL’S three breweries in Dar es Salaam, Moshi, and Mwanza.
SBL has over the last five years, embarked on empowering local farmers to produce quality cereals to enable the brewer to get the necessary ingredients and boost the farmers’ economic well-being.
More farmers are set to join SBL’s agri-business project, a programme that provides farmers with high-quality seedlings free of charge, links them to financial institutions to acquire the capital needed for large scale farming and supplies them with fertilizers and other farming implements.
The main objective of this grand initiative is to work with Tanzanian farmers to help them create self-sustaining businesses and secure the local production of raw materials.
Agribusiness partnership with farmers is geared towards propping up the financial fortunes of the local farmers by including them into the SBL supply chain while extending and improving Tanzanian’s long term and short term farming goals as a whole.
A large-scale farmer from the Kilimanjaro Region, Said Msua is one of the beneficiaries of the support provided by SBL.
“SBL agri-business project has been helpful to me because the company has consistently provided me with fertilizer, seedlings and insecticide,” he said.
On his part, Mwinyi Makame from the Manyara Region said; “I am very grateful to SBL because they have provided me with seedlings and other farming implements without fail.”
He explains that once the additional farmers are incorporated into the project, they will benefit from over 300 tonnes of seedlings that the brewer provides to the beneficiaries annually.
The benefits accrued by the 100 households so far under the project, he adds, include the purchase of tractors, boom sprayers, and improved economic conditions like constructing permanent houses and being able to take children to school.
According to him, SBL has increased its locally-sourced raw materials to 10,000 tons within the past four years, equivalent to 70 per cent of the total raw materials used in beer production annually.