Chronicle Editor
Mhlupheki Dube
ONE of the issues I am passionate about in livestock production is solution providing invention and research.
It is a well-known fact that livestock farmers like any other form of farmers face a myriad of challenges which range from hostile climate to environment.
The environment part being the physical and wildlife environment, to human environment if ever there is anything like that.
Ranchers mostly struggle with hostile climate which results in endless droughts and such difficult operational field. Then you have wildlife and humans providing serious predation challenges to the livestock farmer. So the big question or questions will be “where are the problem-solving inventions or innovations for such troubling challenges for the livestock farmer”? Are farmers participating in research and innovation led by our research institutions and other tertiary institutions?
It is no secret that I have previously quarreled with some researchers and research institutions for engaging in not so useful researches which are meant for nothing other than fulfilling a higher degree requirement. The kind of research that is usually abstract and nonsensical that the writer hardly remembers what he/she worked on, the moment they graduate! My point is, should we be celebrating how published an individual is on a wide range of journals or we should be celebrating the wide adoption of his/her innovation or recommendations? To me the latter is a clear testimony of the solution provision nature of your publication and by extension its usefulness to the end user, who is the livestock farmer in this case.
My submission therefore is that as livestock farmers and practitioners we need more of research and innovation that answers every day challenges for the livestock farmer. It is my conviction that this can be achieved only if we bring on board the critical stakeholders in this, the farmers themselves.
I move in this article for farmer led research and innovation. It is a tested fact that livestock farmers are experimenting with a number of methods everyday trying to address challenges peculiar to their area. It could be calf predation, drought challenges, drinking water issues and even diseases challenges.
We need research that can build on the rudimentary efforts of livestock farmers and refine their experiments into solutions that can be replicated in other areas. Honestly how does it happen that close to 90 percent of our national herd belongs to smallholder farmers and yet these farmers are largely not involved in any researches that seek to provide answers to their daily challenges?
Shouldn’t we be having well established interface between smallholder livestock farmers and our research institutions? How does it happen that in this day of GPS, satellite and smart phones, farmers still have to track their animals using spoors and gongs (amabhela)?
With all the technological advancement and applications being developed every day, can we not have an invention of a chip or something that can be inserted on one’s animal and be tracked through a smartphone?
At this day and age should we really be crying of stock theft where a farmer’s animal is stolen and disappears forever? It’s about time our science and development sector came to party on this one! Let’s have livestock farmers participating in our research institutions not only as trial objects but idea generators. I reiterate that livestock farmers have challenges which they face every day in various facets of their enterprise and these are very researchable and solutions found, perhaps with the farmers’ ideas!
The sooner we transform our research field from an undergraduate or post graduate requirement into a solution provision method, the faster we can be able to transform our livestock farmers. Let’s bring in our biggest constituency of livestock owners who are the smallholder farmers, hear their ideas and refine them into plausible solutions.
This method of unilateral abstract ideas being generated in some ivory towers by some chap who does not even own a goat and expects to help farmers, is simply a fallacy!
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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