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Zimbabwean small-scale farmers have tended to drift towards just growing and harvesting a small handful of crops rather than exploring the full range of what they can grow and sell to boost farm incomes.
The Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development appreciates the possibilities and unlike previous dispensations wants to convert the theory to plants growing in the ground.
We have had far more attention paid to the traditional grains, the plants domesticated in Africa over the past few thousand years, and thus automatically suited for African conditions.
In fact, the sorghums and millets were the staple food of Zimbabwe until a little over a century ago, with maize, which originated in Mexico, introduced way back via coastal trade routes and certainly grown, but more as a roasted vegetable.
It was the rise of the urban settlements that tended to stress maize and the settler farmers wanted that market.
Cotton has been reintroduced as the double crop, oil seed and fibre, and the financial mess the sector had fallen into is being straightened out.
Another crop now being added to the basic lists in the small-scale schemes is sunflower. Again this is a Mexican-origin crop, that was moved to Europe where it was taken up with great enthusiasm in Russia and Ukraine, which between them still produce more than half the world crop, and then taken back to the Americas for major commercial production.
Amid all this movement it also arrived in Southern Africa. As a drought-resistant crop on sandier soils, largely due to its very deep rooting system, it became popular in the smallholder sector and at one stage, some decades ago, almost every homestead had a sunflower patch and it was a welcome cash crop for many families.
A lot of Zimbabweans can remember the bright glow of the flowers on a corner of their grandfather’s small farm.
Those appropriate technology fanatics, who often come up with some very good ideas, noticed that sunflower oil was one of the few tropical oil seeds that could be extracted by crushing rather than using the ubiquitous solvent techniques, necessary for soya and usually used for cotton.
So they developed a simple hand press and there were people in rural areas who, for a modest fee, would convert sunflower seed to sunflower oil.
The straight-run oil was a trifle cloudy, but perfectly safe and more tasty than the refined product. The neighbourhood processing also helped with the common vegetable oil problem of oxidation, which shortens keeping properties, since it was easy to keep the seeds and have them ground when required, or at least a month or two before they were required.
For some reason, probably a combination of reduced buying and a lack of any serious promotion of the crop, far less was grown. And yet there is a market in Zimbabwe. The country imports up to 65 000 tonnes of sunflower oil a year. As with reasonably good farming techniques you get a little over 1 tonne of oil from the almost 1 600 tonnes of seed from a hectare of average yield we could usefully plant 65 000 hectares.
It sounds a lot, but when you think about it, one million families could plant little plots of 650 square metres, almost a return to those old plots of those grandfathers who educated their children off the patch. Hence the decision of the Agriculture Ministry to start adding sunflower seed and other inputs to the small-farm mix.
Of course, more might be grown, but Zimbabwe is still short of cooking oil and there is no reason to fill all demand with soya. In the past, we had a range and sunflower was even sold, and is still sold, as a premium grade, even though cotton-seed oil has a much longer shelf life.
But the point is as you add more oils to the mix, consumers can choose what they see as an ideal blend, and the exceptional high percentage of unsaturated fats in sunflower will attract its market.
In any case it is one of the more useful oils to use in a margarine blend. But for the small-scale farmer the main purpose of farming is now to earn a decent living, making as much money as possible and being able to make money even when the weather co-operates less than the farmer desires.
The present thrust of widening the range of crops, as well as improving yields and gaining more output for each kilogramme of fertiliser and hour or labour, is a major plank of the farming revolution that has already started empowering some of the poorest Zimbabweans and bringing them into the modern business world.
Small rich farms in Europe, for example, produce a wide range of crops and livestock and quite often the waste from one crop adds nutrients for another or is a source of food for some of the livestock. Little can be categorised as “waste” on such a productive farm. This is what the present development thrust in Zimbabwe is wishing to see here.
The first critical step was to stop talking about commercial small-scale farming and start ensuring that it was possible for a farming family to practise this, both with the techniques that maximise yields and reduce planting risks, and the inputs needed to make the transformation practical.
This requires some money, but it is a lot cheaper to help someone produce reasonable harvests for farm consumption and for sale, than hand out food relief.
And unlike handouts, better and more diversified farming grows the national economy as well, so switching over the budgets has so many advantages that Treasury, while wanting decent accounting and zero waste, was willing to back the farming experts.
Online Reporter