Time to acknowledge goats’ valuable economic role In contemporary Zimbabwe, the goat has transformed from being just another ‘livestock unit’ to an economic asset whose value is reckoned in terms of the milk, meat and manure to fertilise crops that it produces

Obert Chifamba Agri-Insight

In contemporary Zimbabwe, the goat has transformed from being just another ‘livestock unit’ to an economic asset whose value is reckoned in terms of the milk, meat and manure to fertilise crops that it produces.

It has literally become a form of insurance against unforeseen contingencies and a kind of capital asset to finance the occasional expenditure.

Now, with all these attributes, the goat has essentially become the proverbial stone that builders overlooked, only to become the capstone of the building at some point.

Given the ease with which the goat can be managed, it is safe to conclude that most households can afford to keep them and benefit from their multiple economic uses whose prominence was not allowed to show in the not-too-distant past.

It is unfortunate that it took long for most people to realise that the small ruminant was endowed with an assortment of attributes that could easily benefit them if tapped into.

Many people did not keep goats for commercial reasons, but just for the meat, manure and the occasional social events that required meat in larger volumes than what the road runner could provide.

The interesting observation is that Government has since acknowledged the importance of goats and encouraged development partners, its departments and farmers to work towards boosting production of this type of livestock and let the animals play their economic role effectively in their lives.

On the backdrop of growing calls for farmers to treat everything they do as businesses, goat farming has also come into the limelight, thanks to its being simple and cost effective.

The advantage that goats have over most livestock units is that they can tolerate drought conditions and can survive even under conditions that ordinarily would kill animals such as cattle.

In the past, trading in goats has not been as lucrative as the business-minded farmer of today would have wanted because there have always been challenges in securing formal markets.

Thus farmers struggled to get profits from them.

The recent stepping in of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Growth Programme (ZAGP) will naturally help address marketing constraints that litter the goat value chain.

These challenges have forced most farmers to sell-off animals for a song. In some cases, these goat producers have fallen prey to conmen masquerading as genuine middlemen.

ZAGP’s intervention has helped create a fair trading platform for the small-scale goat farmers and key off-take butcheries to ensure that they extract maximum value from their animals.

This European Union (EU) funded Government initiative has come in as a panacea to the value chain bottleneck challenges in the goat industry.

It is exciting to observe that since its introduction in 20 districts across the country in 2019, farmers’ profits from goat selling have started rising significantly.

The programme is running in 12 areas that fall under dry regions 4 and 5. Districts such as Buhera, Chipinge, Chikomba, Mudzi, Mbire, Rushinga, Beitbridge, Binga, Matobo, Nkayi, Lupane and Gwanda were some of the first to benefit under the programme.

The centres will, among other functions, become primary business hubs for small and medium goat producers offering various services such as breed improvement, dipping, veterinary drug sales, sale of fodder seed and aggregation of bulk slaughter stock.

They will promote on-farm feed formulation, creation of livestock business centres and production of livestock inputs and veterinary vaccines and medicines but most importantly maintaining value for money by cutting out middlemen who for years have been the biggest parasite sucking the farmers dry.

Facts availed by ZAGP indicate that the model is proving to be very effective with 2 309 goats weighing 25 306 kilogrammes having been sold by 683 farmers through the direct marketing approach and generating US$78 618 as at October 2022.

This rubber-stamps assertions that direct marketing can significantly push up profit margins for farmers to reach an average of 30 percent compared to farm gate prices and sales through intermediaries or middlemen who in most cases factor in their commission fees.

The fact that the programme will enable farmers to form production corridors to supply meat and meat products directly to independent licensed butcheries means that farmers do not need the unscrupulous middlemen linking them to markets.

Middlemen have been known to rip off farmers and getting at least 55 percent of the share value and leaving the former with only 17 percent in most cases.

This kind of scenario has in some cases forced farmers out of practice while some have resorted to just keeping goats for their own purposes yet there are opportunities to make money out of the animals out there.

One sure fact is that farmers are getting the real value of their animals and have the capacity to bargain prices, factoring in their costs of production.

The good thing is that demand for goat meat currently far outweighs the supply, which makes it prudent for more farmers to migrate from informal sales to the direct marketing strategy.

So far, 10 000 registered farmers are working in formalised ward and district groupings known as goat producers’ business associations that are tasked with driving and co-ordinating the commercial interests of the farmer members.

The ZAGP programme has opened up boundless opportunities for goat producers and targets to increase production, productivity, market competitiveness and organisational efficiencies for goat and pork producers, while it also addresses market end constraints.

There are deliberate efforts to increase efficiencies at the production node through promotion of good animal husbandry practices such as dipping, vaccination, supplementary feeding — all aimed at reducing high mortality rates.

Besides opening up marketing opportunities for farmers, the programme has also enabled the goat producers access to imported top quality breeding stock to improve the national breeding herd and boost gene pool.

This has seen 312 Boer, Sannen, Toggenburg and Kalahari red goat breeding stock being imported from Namibia to help improve breeds.

The breeding stock was distributed among four institutions for multiplication, namely Zvikomborero Farm, Michview Enterprises, Matopo and Grasslands Research Institutes with two bucks being delivered to each goat improvement centre for breeding services under the management of the Goat Producers Business Associations (GPBAs).

The programme is attaching serious value to properly managed breeding to improve the quality of animals that farmers produce for the market and even for their own domestic consumption.

This will also help grow the national goat herd with propagation and distribution to farmers going on at various improvement centres and private sector integrators.

On the one hand, the ZAGP programme will help address the challenges of the unavailability of a product grading system, poor quality product, seasonality of demand, inconsistent product supply and insufficient research to identify                                                              new markets and expand existing ones, which have been making it difficult for farmers to realise the true value of their goats.

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