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Farming issues with Mhlupheki Dube
ONE of the satisfactions of holding this space is that I get to interact with farmers in various corners of this beautiful country of ours, and even beyond borders. The interaction usually comes in form of feedback and reactions to the articles that I have been posting on this space every week for close to eleven years now!
Due to this interaction with farmers and livestock value chain players, I have come to categorise my followers into two broad sectors, that is knowledge seekers and knowledge givers and the former being the bigger.
The common thing between the two sectors being the realisation that knowledge is a very important component of livestock production. This week’s submission therefore hinges on this very important aspect of knowledge generation, seeking and sharing.
It is not an accident that most farming based research stations are situated close to the farming communities.
This is because it has been long accepted that farmers, be they crop or livestock producers, generate a wealth amount of knowledge every day as they work their fields or animals. It is called experiential learning, and it doesn’t come any more useful than that. There is no better knowledge that the one generated from lived experience.
Farmers generate this knowledge from their daily observations, the trial-and-error methods they use and they perfect these overtime until it becomes something very useful which can be shared with other farmers facing similar challenges.
The research institutions then perfect these trials or experiments from a scientific point of view to see if these can be replicated elsewhere and when they are satisfied of the outcomes, they publish these in scientific journals for sharing with the wider knowledge thirst farming community.
The important aspect therefore, is that as farmers we need to be actively searching for knowledge to address our own situations and improve production. You could be struggling with a problem which other farmers elsewhere long found a solution to.
Continuous learning is very important in farming systems be they crop or livestock production.
The world is in a continuous state of evolving in terms of production and marketing practices. You could be stuck in the old ways of doing things when there are new and more effective ways of doing business. Social media platforms and other techno-based ways of doing business should be embraced as these provide faster and broader means of information sharing.
You can sell your heifers right from the comfort of your bedroom to a buyer based somewhere oversee! You just have to embrace the new paradigms and make them work for you.
Change is not usually easy, this writer for example is still not on twitter, but we need to get into these platforms so that we can look for information as well as sharing information much easier and much faster. It goes without mention that the downside of these platforms is that there is a lot of wrong information that is peddled around with reckless abandon and hence you need to triangulate and verify the authenticity of the information from a number of sources before you can try it on your animals.
There are a lot of fly-by-night experts crawling the internet and you will do yourself good service by cross checking what you got from the internet, with real experts on the ground, that you know.
One sad thing that I have found from most livestock farmers, is this false entitlement to free knowledge. Somehow the farmer feels they should ask for your expert knowledge on something affecting their animals, and you should just hand that information with no cost on their part!
May be this is the unintended consequence of government extensive investment on free extension services to smallholder communal farmers such that farmers now think everyone and anyone with the knowledge should just hand them that knowledge for free! Knowledge has a price tag to it and as farmers we should be ready to pay for that knowledge if we want real improvement in our production systems.
Livestock farmers with a commercial mindset have long grasped this concept, that you look for professional extension services and you pay for that service. The other important aspect of knowledge and learning, is for farmers to avail themselves to various farmer gatherings such as agricultural shows.
This could be within the country or even outside the country if you have the means to get there. There is a lot of new approaches, inventions and ideas that are displayed on these shows that a farmer will always benefit from. Actively seeking for new knowledge and new approaches should occupy the existing and emerging livestock farmers if we want to be more effective in the changing production environments.
Lastly, I want to discuss one important aspect that eludes most of our farmers and that is documentation of experiences. The power of writing down was long acknowledged by various civilisations and yet most of us farmers we still underestimate the importance of documentation.
What is today recognised as certain knowledge around some production aspects, began as mere documented experience of some farmers elsewhere. What new knowledge are we generating from our continuous and meticulous documentation in our farms?
Let’s have farming which is knowledge driven from the perspective of generating, seeking and sharing knowledge. Uyabonga umntaka MaKhumalo.
l Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback [email protected] cell 0772851275
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