I am excited to say that I have developed an android app called Nkhumba Manager, an application for pig farming managent.
This project is personal to me because I have been a pig farmer myself. I have bought pigs, raised them, fed them, taken care of them, watched them grow, and eventually sold pigs that I had raised. That experience gave me an appreciation of what pig farming really involves. It is not simply about keeping animals and waiting for them to mature. A farmer has to make important decisions every day, from how much to feed the pigs and how much that feed is costing, to knowing when a sow is likely to farrow, keeping track of expenses, managing disease risks and understanding whether the farm is actually making a profit.
For many farmers, these decisions are still made using experience, memory and sometimes gut feeling. Experience is extremely valuable, but in an environment where feed costs continue to rise and diseases such as African Swine Fever remain a serious threat, I believe farmers also need access to reliable records, practical information and data that can help them make better decisions. That is where the idea for Nkhumba Manager began.
As I continued working with technology, I started asking myself what a digital farm management tool would look like if it were genuinely designed around the realities of a Malawian pig farmer. I did not want to simply build a simple farming application. I wanted to create something that understands our environment, our farming practices, our local feeds, our languages and the challenges that farmers actually face.
Nkhumba Manager brings together a number of tools designed with that purpose in mind. It includes a gestation tracker to help farmers monitor pregnancies and prepare for farrowing, while the Madeya Mixer helps farmers work out practical ratios of maize bran and soya cake to achieve targeted protein levels while keeping feed costs under control.
I have also included tools that look beyond the pig itself and consider the entire farm system. Pig manure, for example, does not necessarily have to be treated as waste. Nkhumba Manager provides guidance around transforming manure into Mbeya Fertilizer and biogas, creating opportunities for farmers to turn farm waste into useful products and energy.
Another part of the platform is the bilingual AI Farm Assistant, designed to provide practical guidance in both English and Chichewa on areas such as pig nutrition, breeding, health and general farm management.
But for me, Nkhumba Manager is about much more than the features inside the app. It is about giving farmers better tools to understand what is happening on their farms and make decisions based on information rather than guesswork.
I know what it feels like to invest money in pigs, buy feed, take care of them day after day and eventually take them to market. When you have raised the animals yourself, you understand that every bag of feed, every treatment and every expense matters. You also understand the satisfaction of finally selling pigs that you have watched grow from the beginning. That personal experience is one of the reasons I decided to build Nkhumba Manager.
I believe we can build agricultural technology for Malawi, by people who understand Malawi. Technology that understands our farmers, our feeds, our languages, our challenges and, most importantly, our opportunities.
My hope is that Nkhumba Manager will help farmers reduce unnecessary costs, keep better records, plan more effectively, improve productivity and gradually transform smallholdings into more sustainable and professional enterprises.
This is my contribution towards smarter pig farming in Malawi, and I am excited to see where this journey takes us. Welcome to Nkhumba Manager.
The Curious Mind 