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Charles Dhewa —
As the farming season gets underway in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, there is an overwhelming assumption that providing farmers with inputs, weather information and extension advice is all that is needed to ensure food security and surplus commodities for the market. However, as agriculture-driven economies become highly competitive, knowledge requirements are also becoming very complex.
While everyone can plant crops and rear livestock, the talent needs of different value chains have not been fully scoped and understood. That is why there is an over-supply of certain skills and capabilities while some critical skills are missing.
Unfortunately, formal training institutions such as colleges and universities continue offering training courses based on what lecturers were trained on, not what is needed by agricultural value chains.
That is why we end up with too many agricultural economists, livestock specialists and agronomists than the market can absorb. In a rapidly changing global economy and digital landscape, farmers and agricultural communities that fully understand their talent needs and know how to meet them will remain competitive. In the absence of the required talent, every food producer is trying to produce similar commodities for the same market. In most cases the market is not expanding in line with production.
Harnessing the power of a data-driven approach
A data-driven approach to agricultural development will help in determining how factors like farmer behaviour, experience and aptitude can impact performance. Without paying attention to data it is difficult to identify and specify challenges likely to confront farmers in the event of a bumper harvest.
The majority of farmers are not able to deal with bumper harvests which end up translating into bumper problems in terms of post-harvest losses and blaming other value chain actors such as traders and processors.
Accurate data will help in coming up with specific skills and competencies needed along diverse agricultural value chains. Some of the questions farmers should think about as they get into the farming season include: Why are we in agriculture? Who are our customers? What do they expect from us? Who would miss us if we stopped farming?
While they may have access to government extension advice, most farmers face the following challenges which call for diverse evidence and knowledge sources:
- Lack of organisation for knowledge sharing. It’s not enough to be neighbouring farmers when you do not share knowledge. Such a dilemma often results in farmers travelling distances for advice, knowledge and other resources that the neighbour may actually be possessing in abundance.
- Lack of a networking culture. As a result, each farmer can be stuck with his own challenges and opportunities that are difficult to unlock individually. Absence of resource mobilisation and resource sharing models. For resettled farmers, re-purposing resources that were previously meant for one large estate into more than 20 plots of different sizes calls for acute skills in resource re-allocated and deployment. Under-estimating such knowledge is a recipe for failure.
On the other hand, it often takes an outsider to see how some farming communities are blessed beyond measure. Some of the advantages prevalent in Zimbabwe’s new farming communities include:
- Abundance of natural resources such as land, water, pastures and forestry.
- Abundant infrastructure such as irrigation equipment, warehouse facilities, good road network and favourable temperatures.
- Diverse professional skills and capacities. You can find diverse professional skills among new land owners. Notable titles include: retired District Agritex Officer, retired Police Inspector, former Ambassador, former business men as well as youths conversant with ICTs. Consolidating all these background skills will make such farming communities untouchable from a productivity point of view.
Why farming communities should invest in new talent
As competition hots up and the importance of data-driven farming becomes apparent, farming communities will need to invest in new digital talent that can harness their experiences, experiments, hesitations, doubts, fears, ambitions, aspirations and hopes.
Such intelligence cannot be gathered by merely asking farmers to tell you what they are doing. Digital technology has enormous power to retrieve and extend individual and community memory in ways that can build a strong knowledge base. That means ICT graduates should engage with farming communities to understand agricultural value chain actors.
They can then conduct ethnographic research, human-centered design as well as rapid testing and learning cycles with value chain actors. They should be able to rapidly translate what they see on the ground into agricultural-focused software that can make agricultural knowledge sharing more fluent. Digital technical excellence is useless without real-time experiences of value chain actors.
Another critical knowledge that can be surfaced through digital talent is valuation of available resources in farming communities. Lack of detailed valuation of available resources so that they become a strong economic base for the farmers is a big missing link at the moment.
Besides soil and water testing, such capacities include assessing a farming community’s collective production capacity. That will ultimately attract investors, financial institutions, processing companies and venture capitalists into the community.
Making ICTs relevant to agriculture
The rapid pace of change means farming communities have to engage with broader ecosystems encompassing a range of businesses and diverse technologies. Alongside interpreting results from soil and water testing towards recommending the right inputs, agriculture now requires unique digital capabilities.
These can be provided by university and college graduates in disciplines like data science, computer programming and behavioural economics. Such knowledge will ensure farmers are able to operate quickly while focusing on consumer needs and insights. Unfortunately, few ICT graduates take agriculture as a career path.
To be relevant in the agriculture sector, ICT graduates should design knowledge systems that can process massive amounts of data generated along entire value chains and deliver new insights rapidly. They should also be flexible enough to integrate with outside platforms in ways that deliver exceptional experiences from all value chain actors including consumers.
Rather than trying to depend on the heroics or talents of individuals, a befitting entry point is taking advantage of each farming community’s collective skills base. Depending on their creativity and curiosity, ICT graduates can develop a deep understanding of technologies that can solve agricultural problems. Eventually they can also hone strong communication and influencing skills as well as unique abilities for tracking progress.
At the moment many farmers are receiving information from many sources but are not sure what to do next. Also critical for ICT graduates is acquiring experience in working as change agents who can transform how farming communities and agribusinesses think and work. This means they have to be focused on impact and building the muscle of farming communities around measuring their progress.
There is no longer any doubt that, as agribusinesses and farming communities move toward sophisticated commercial production, they need a new breed of agronomists, livestock specialists, nutritionists and ICT specialists who know how to work with data. These experts should be fluent in diverse agribusiness techniques as well as in choosing the right models, design learning procedures that fit available data.
Since many value chain actors are increasingly engaging with external ecosystems, they are developing fluency in several capacities that have to be integrated into value chains. Such capacity to integrate value chains can come from ICTs since they tend to be good at manipulating data and evidence.
It is now very clear that sustainable change in food security and consistent supply of commodities to processors and consumers can come from meshing traditional extension models with new talent from other disciplines.
Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge management specialist and chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa (Pvt) (www.knowledgetransafrica.com) whose flagship eMKambo (www.emkambo.co.zw) has a presence in more than 20 agricultural markets in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on: [email protected] ; Mobile: +263 774 430 309 / 772 137 717/ 712 737 430.
Online Reporter