Online Reporter
DRYLAND farmers are now starting to plant after two weeks of good early rains across much of Zimbabwe has built up soil moisture levels and penetrated to reasonable depths, with more decent rains, even flooding, expected.
The Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development has given the go-ahead for farmers, especially those using farming systems that harvest water and build up moisture levels, to start planting and by the end of this week reckons that at least half of fertiliser and seed inputs will be with the Pfumvudza/Intwasa farmers whom the ministry directly supports and supplies.
This early delivery of inputs will be critical in making full use of the season.
Zimbabwean farmers need to plant at least some of their crops as early as sensibly possible to cope with what has become a general shortening of the average season.
In giving not just a go-ahead for planting but providing active encouragement, Agriculture Minister Dr Anxious Masuka made it clear that farmers still need to use their newly acquired skills and knowledge built up in recent years as they combat difficult climate conditions.
A decent start to the rainy season is not a reason to abandon good farming practices.
The Second Republic has managed to build up farm outputs, both on individual farms and in the country as a whole, by applying sound science and careful crop selection and a good rainy season allows farmers greater production but they still need to follow the basics.
Smallholder farmers, basically those in the communal lands and the A1 resettlement areas, have to follow the Pfumvudza/Intwasa method of conservation agriculture before they get their free inputs.
This combination of training, the digging out planting holes, and following the advice of extension staff has brought up total harvests, yields and income on these smaller farms.
This is allowing the smallholders to grow much of their own food and still have ever-growing surpluses for sale.
The Government schemes have seen these farmers, for long abandoned as just subsistence farmers, starting earning cash incomes as they treat farming as a business.
It is still very hard work, and the modern production methods make the preparatory work even harder, but at least farmers are getting rewarded for their effort.
The other aspect stressed by Minister Masuka was to grow the best crops for each region.
Government programmes have been moving away from letting farmers in drier areas gamble that they can grow maize, when historical records show this was always a dubious proposition that might just work one year in five, and climate change means that even this is now optimistic.
The traditional grains, for long ignored except perhaps as livestock feed, are making a comeback among consumers who are interested in the revival of healthy recipes from the past before maize moved into dominance around a century ago in colonial economics.
The growing consumer demand is helping create markets that are needed so that farmers in the more arid areas can harvest a crop that is a far better bet than maize.
Farmers, while somewhat dubious at the beginning of the more targeted seed inputs, have been seeing results and so are ready to embrace traditional grains that are indigenous to Africa, which everyone used to eat, but perhaps need more backing from agro-industrialists ready to process these grains and continue building up markets.
As we have noted before, there seems to be room for more research in traditional grains, using the huge gene pools that exist in any indigenous plant, to provide variety as well as decent harvests.
The traditional beer brewers kept the research concentrating on taste alive during the colonial period and so have shown the way, where farmers can have both a highly desirable food crop with good yields on drier lands.
So while farmers must take full advantage of a good rainy season, especially as these are rarer in this age of rapid climate change, they still need to put good farming practice high on their agenda so they can maximise the gains from a good season and can cope with the almost inevitable dry spells and other hazards that emerge.
So long as farmers are following good scientific advice, and these days successful farming is built up around lot of research and rational innovation, they should have the reserve capacity to take advantage of better weather while still being able to cope with rough times and interludes that in the past may have been fatal to their crops.
There are few certainties in dryland farming, and not that many in irrigated farming, which is why farmers always need to give themselves the best odds of success.
