Online Reporter
ZIMBABWE, as has become the norm in recent years, is looking at once again breaking the record for wheat harvests this year, with 662 000 tonnes expected from 125 000 hectares.
There is plenty of water in irrigation dams and a constant power supply of 155 megawatts, about 9 percent of what is generated, has been committed by Zesa to ensure farmers can pump the water to their lands.
Both assured supplies of water and electricity are needed to grow this 100 percent irrigated crop.
The guarantee of a constant power supply, with no load-shedding, was given in the energy-agriculture working group, that brings together the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Water Resources and the Ministry of Energy and Power Development.
Intermittent power supplies have been cited by farmers as the most likely cause of poor production and losses.
Funding for inputs has been sorted out, with backing from the National Enhanced Agricultural Productivity Scheme (NEAPS), financed by AFC Bank and CBZ Bank, private contractors, the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA), the Presidential Input Scheme for smaller farms and self-financed commercial farmers.
Despite global supply chain pressures as a result of Middle East wars, authorities say measures are in place to minimise disruptions, particularly around availability of nitrogenous fertilisers.
So, as is now usual, our farmers are ready to produce, and with bottlenecks in the supply chain being eliminated should have higher yields, so making the most of their inputs.
Local consumption of wheat is rising, now that all requirements for soft wheat are grown locally, with a modest surplus, so the constraints letting Zimbabweans eat more wheat products have vanished.
In fact, the more varied diet that many families are adopting, eating products made from maize, traditional grains and wheat, provides not only greater variety in what appears on the table, but opens ever more opportunities for Zimbabwean farmers and agro-industrialists to spread their wings as they expand production and available products.
There are still some gaps though. While Zimbabwean farmers produce all the softer wheat that the rest of us can eat, we still import hard wheats. These are needed to blend into bread flours for better quality loaves, and although the blend is strongly weighted in favour of local wheat, we do eat a lot of bread and are eating more of this convenience food all the time, especially as national wealth rises.
Pasta is becoming ever more popular and here the flour needs to be either a strong percentage of hard durum wheat, or even pure durum wheat. Because Zimbabwe was, until fairly recently, an importer of all types of wheat, there was not much urgency to find suitable varieties and work out farming techniques for durum wheat.
We have now moved into a new era. Durum wheat is grown in warmer and drier climates than those considered ideal for softer wheats and is a major crop in North Africa, the Middle East and parts of southern Europe. This means it should be an ideal crop for Zimbabwe but will need irrigation because the areas where it flourishes have winter rainfall.
Progress has been made on finding a suitable variety of durum wheat to grow in Zimbabwe and what we need to do now is start moving from the research to finding farmers who can be the pioneers of this new crop with full support and backing. Once the research teams and the farmers have worked out how to grow durum, a percentage of the wheat area and irrigation, say 10 percent to 20 percent, can be assigned this crop.
This would mean we would be growing all our wheat, hard and soft, although exports will probably have to be the final supermarket-ready products from the agro-industrial factories. We pay our farmers a small premium to grow wheat, to cover the irrigation costs. This for local consumption is balanced by the much lower transport costs to consumers, but does make exports more difficult unless there is global scarcity.
But in any case, it is time we started applying the same policy to agricultural exports that we are already applying to mineral exports, having the value added and processing done in Zimbabwe.
This will put emphasis on quality for our farming, since those who buy Zimbabwean goods will be demanding a quality product that gives value for the money they pay.
