With El Nino conditions highly probable in the coming season, Zimbabwe is taking sensible and scientifically-based steps to ensure farmers can obtain reasonable harvests both for on-farm consumption and for sale.
This is the only rational response.
Hiding our heads in the sand and pretending everything will be fine on the day, or moving to the other extreme and panicking or just giving up, will never work.
What works, as everyone from President Mnangagwa down through the experts in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Water Development has been pressing, is to make sure we are all prepared and can cope.
Smallholder farmers have already come to see the worth of the Pfumvudza/Intwasa scheme since it was introduced in 2020, with the Agriculture Ministry continually refining the process and making sure that the farmers who enter the programme get their seed and fertiliser inputs on time.
Agricultural extension workers do have to check the plots, and this season they are insisting on the correct size of holes and adequate mulch stores, before authorising inputs, so chancers and phantom plot holders get nothing.
But with almost 5 million plots already prepared, covering a record 1 million ha, it is clear that the smallholders are willing to make strenuous efforts to ensure they get a harvest and preferably one large enough to produce the useful surpluses that can be sold for income.
The transition of smallholder farmers from subsistence producers to proper businesses is continuing, regardless of the climatic uncertainty that now seems so common with global warming.
This in turn continues to drive that rural development so critical if Zimbabwe is to meet its goal of an upper middle income economy by 2030.
That means that prosperity has to be inclusive, and not limited to small chosen few.
Rather it needs the contribution of everyone.
Smallholder farmers are no longer a majority of the population, but they are easily the largest single group and so their prosperity is extremely important.
We know that even in severe droughts, heavy thunderstorms occur, and often bring a higher percentage of rain than the gentle long showers over several days that farmers really like.
So technical experts are helping farmers plan their drainage to protect their plots but also to divert and use this bonus water.
This, like the plot preparation, requires hard digging so the results need to justify that hard work.
There is growing recognition that the traditional grains really come into their own in dubious seasons.
Sorghum, finger millet and millet are not exotic crops. They were domesticated in Africa, in particular sub-Saharan African, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
Varieties have been adapted and grown for several thousand years, with farmers and farming communities seeking the best.
After a great deal of research neglect, the last few decades have seen some serious applied research to increase yields and survivability.
The Agriculture Ministry has been determined to ensure that Zimbabwe gains full value from the investments now being made into smallholder farming, and that means choosing the right crops and the right varieties of each crop for expected weather conditions in each area.
A flourishing field of traditional grain makes more sense than a field of dried up and dead immature maize giving zero return, except perhaps as more mulch for the smarter farmers.
The traditional grains were the staple diet in Zimbabwe right up into the 1920s, although maize, originally domesticated in what is now Mexico, had drifted along African trade routes from coastal trading posts for a few hundred years.
Maize was the plantation grain of choice, so received almost all the research effort until all too recently.
One huge advantage of the traditional grains over maize, besides being able to cope with lower rainfall, is that they do not wilt and die in a longish dry spell.
They stop growing, but when more rain falls, they resume growth.
Regrettably, sorghum and the millets have been seen as survival crops, to be grown in difficult times rather than as a crop of first choice.
Part of the reason for the switch to maize was the far greater ease of processing and cooking, and the simpler grinding mills that became ubiquitous across rural Zimbabwe.
But modern technology and steels have negated that advantage, and it would seem sensible to see these modern grinding mills becoming a lot more common.
Some sterling work has been done to uncover the old traditional recipes and create new ones using these grains, but a lot more needs to be done to make sure that these recipes do reach all kitchens. Not everyone has a great-grandmother on tap as a resource person.
The major millers can take a lead here, helping to create new markets that will benefit the farmers, giving millers more business, and giving consumers more variety.
Climate change is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
We all need to learn to cope and adapt so farmers can grow enough food, agro-industries have their raw materials and we all get enough decent quality food.
Climate proofing, making sure the right inputs are available on time, and using the best crop varieties can push a large group of Zimbabweans, the smallholder farmers, from dire poverty to respectable prosperity, able to afford and willing to buy what the rest of us make and offer.
