Zimpapers Logo

The new stress on crop yields, rather than just on hectarage being planted, shows the success of the initial agricultural programmes and the support given to farmers by the Second Republic.

The targets are now less and less achieving national food security since we have reached or are about to reach these levels. Agriculture has been moving solidly forward since the Second Republic started making sure that farmers could advance.

This year we are expected to record tobacco harvests, maintain self-sufficiency in wheat with a bit left over, have harvests that are almost certain to create adequate reserves of maize and traditional grains as well as feed everyone, the rapid closing of the gap in vegetable oils between what our processes need and what our farmers grow, cotton output growing to levels where the resuscitation of our textile industry now seems assured, beef output almost back to the levels where exports can resume, and dairy output growing steadily with imports being cut each year.

So what is now needed is to push farming incomes, and make sure we make best use of our land, a finite resource, and the inputs, which are rising in price quite sharply as those same farmers continually remind us.

This means we need to harvest more tonnes of everything per hectare. The cost of land preparation, from the Pfumvudza/Intwasa holes to the ploughing still required for some crops is fixed per hectare.

The cost of inputs per hectare is also largely fixed. Sometimes marginal increases in spending on fertiliser and the like can increase a harvest but already as far as possible farmers have access to inputs for the maximum practical harvest.

The Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development has through its directors and agencies noted that yields by some farmers are remarkably low and even the average yields are modest.

So while we are growing our own food, we now need to become more efficient. This is especially critical as more and more farmers move from meeting household needs to making money from what they grow.

And it becomes even more important when we resume food exports, since now we are competing against other farmers and having to factor in transport costs, always a bit on the high side when you live in a landlocked country at the bottom end of a continent.

There have been several constraints on maximising yields for a given hectarage. The first is obviously water.

Some crops, such as all wheat and a lot of horticulture in the majority of months, those when there is no rain or only negligible rain, need continuous irrigation.

But even for summer crops in better watered areas in non-drought years, farmers need supplementary irrigation to get an early start and cope with any gaps in rainfall.

This summer irrigation need not be as intensive as winter irrigation; the same equipment can probably cope with four or five times the area it can manage in winter, but that modest irrigation can in many cases add 50 to 100 percent in yields, especially when we have, like we did last year, a big gap in the rainfall.

Here Government has returned to a continuous and long term programme.

We now have what can be thought of as an assembly line for larger dams, what tend to be called the high-impact dams, with several at various stages of construction at any one time, and every time a new one is commissioned the contractors start work on the next one. There is a constant dam budget.

This needs to be backed by good access to irrigation equipment, but again this is being done with the total deployed at any one time growing all the time.

The Presidential Borehole Programme is another example, a growing number of Zinwa rigs are continually deployed; every time a village gets a borehole the rig is packed up and the trucks move on to the next village on the list. They do not sit idling at some depot.

These boreholes are not just supplying household water. That alone can upgrade household efficiency with a lot of labour saved every day by collecting water nearby, or even getting it from a tap, and the saved person hours, often women hours, can be converted into something that makes money, rather than just keeps a family alive.

The good idea is to use the water not needed at household level for horticulture and that makes sense, since quite small plots can produce decent family food and can be sold in the nearest mine or town.

We should not underestimate the small farm dams, which are ubiquitous in the better developed resettlement areas.

These hold, between them, a lot of water, can be built quite quickly when earthmoving machinery is available, and only need masonry construction and cement for the spillways. Most are too small for long-term storage but can provide irrigation water for a season or two, as well as ensuring livestock are properly watered.

The second factor combines the need for farmers to become more skilled, and to ensure they get advice on the best seed and other inputs, so they can convert every dollar they spend on inputs into ever more crops.

Those extra yields are almost pure profit and certainly reduce the cost of inputs per tonne of crop, important as these costs rise.

The 11 tonne club has now been launched by Government and the private sector to push maize yields from a fixed hectarage, providing a target for good farmers and a reward for those same farmers, although the biggest reward will not so much be the recognition and prizes, but the larger sums paid out by the Grain Marketing Board and the private companies when they buy the extra harvest.

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Dr John Basera, was quite certain of where the advantage of better yields comes, it is more in the Rural Development part of his mandate.

Now we are growing enough food we need to push ever harder on relieving poverty and then continually increasing farmer incomes. In the first step his figures show that a 10 percent increase in yields cuts poverty seven percent, and when poverty is eradicated, or redefined, that extra increase in yields turns into cash.

If farmers can grow more food on less land for the same effort, we win even more, since those farmers can then expand their cash crops and gain extra flows of income.

No farmer is ever going to get a decent income from a single crop; they need to grow a range to get the income they deserve as they move to be the upper middle-income farmers in an upper middle-income society.

Now that we are meeting so many of our household, community and national nutrition needs, they stress needs to move to making more money and growing our household, community and national income.