daniel chigunwe
Obert Chifamba
Agri-Insight
THE agriculture sector recently woke up to the unpalatable news that a family in Nkayi, Matabeleland North, had mistaken a lethal pesticide for a deworming remedy for livestock before administering a tablet of aluminium phosphide to each of their 22 cattle.
Aluminium phosphide is used for fumigating stored grain.
One family member, Dennis Mpofu, was to later explain that there was a problem of miscommunication involving the person who bought the aluminium phosphide, the courier and the person who finally administered it to the animals in the run-up to the catastrophe.
He revealed that the grain-preserving pesticide had been bought in Bulawayo and given to one teenage boy to take it home.
The boy forgot the message and when he got home, he reportedly said the contents were for dosing cattle.
It was a matter of one unfortunate event leading to another with the recipient of the chemical also said to be of a poor educational background and never paused for a second to verify if it was the same with the one they used to give their cattle.
He then administered it and the cattle subsequently started dying a while after the dosage, with only one surviving.
The dead cattle were worth an estimated US$8 500, which makes it a big loss for the family to fathom easily.
Essentially, this unfortunate incident has deprived the family of monetary benefits, manure and draught power for cropping and other crucial activities.
Cattle contribute directly to people’s socio-economic livelihoods food and nutrition security or indirectly through cash income from sales of live cattle and their products, which is used to purchase food and or other household needs.
Sometimes they contribute indirectly through products such as beef and milk, while they are also barter traded when need arises to take care of the occasional crises that may not need to be paid for through cash.
Cattle are also key in many cultural activities that most African families partake in. They are also involved as part of the dowry during lobola ceremonies.
In contemporary times, cattle are reputed for their capacity to store value and can be disposed at any given time to leave the owner liquid in terms of cash or capable of accessing other favours in their exchange.
With the current drive to treat farming as a business, most cattle farmers are now in the habit of keeping mixed breeds whose values are quite high and can dispose them when there are pressing issues.
When such farmers look at a cow, they see it in terms of its commercial value on the market that can also be used to address the occasional expenditure in the absence of liquid cash.
The Nkayi incident should leave all stakeholders in the agriculture industry worried because there are definitely a lot of such incidents that go unpublished and are a result of many factors that also extend beyond the farmers’ responsibilities.
Of course, farmers must not pretend they know everything about cattle because they have been keeping them for many years. They need to approach experts just like they do in other farming disciplines and get advice.
On the one hand, they should also not leave things to chance and always make sure they re-check if things are being done properly and to book.
It is worth noting that Government has since voiced its concerns at the development, with Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development permanent secretary Dr John Basera urging agricultural extension officers to be readily accessible to farmers when they need technical instruction.
Dr Basera revealed that about 70 percent of farmers countrywide had accessed extension services in 2021, which is something worrisome given that every farmer is expected to be at his or her best and play a part in the re-building of the country’s agro-based economy.
Government has also embarked on a programme to capacitate both Agritex and veterinary extension officers giving them motor bikes to improve mobility, tablets to ease communication challenges and sending the officers for numerous trainings on the use of technology to make their job easier.
It seems extension officers may be the ones not playing their part fully well given that the current extension officer-to-farmer ratio is 1:575, which to me may be a big number but not impossible to exhaust for the diligent officer.
Imagine an extension officer putting the farmers into groups and doing virtual extension sessions in line with whatever will be happening in the season and backing that up with visits – chances are that all farmers can access their services either virtually or physically.
Farmers, on the other hand, should also be alive to the fact that they are business people and must buy smart phones or any other gadgets like radios and televisions to make communication easier so that they can access extension officers easily each time they need assistance.
Stock owners can easily form groups in which they can share ideas and discuss problems and activities they will be encountering and doing respectively.
Such platforms will help them get knowledge on how to do things properly instead of just shooting in the dark, yet they can do much better if they take advantage of the current digitalisation the world is going through.
It is refreshing to realise that Government is pushing to reach 100 percent of the extension and farmer reach systems and reduce the farmer-to-extension ratio through various means that also include having at least two extension officers in each of the 1 600 agricultural wards in Zimbabwe across 60 agricultural districts.
There are about 2,7 million farming households and about 4 700 agricultural extension officers, which gives birth to the current farmer to extension officer ratio of about 575:1 that is unfortunately very high, hence the need to push the extension services and farmer reach to 100 percent.
One other issue that needs to be addressed to further improve production and productivity is communication between farmers and extension officers with most farmers not even aware of their locational needs and the global positioning (GPS) of their farms.
They obviously need to be led by the hand by extension officers, which is possible through regular and appropriate education and instructions from the latter either during meetings of individual farm visits.
The smart phones that most farmers buy after selling produce must not only be used as instruments for peddling gossip, but for information exchanges with fellow farmers and service providers alike for the good of their trade.
Online Reporter