adminDumisani Nsingo, Senior Farming Reporter
ENTERPRISING villagers from Chimwara Village in Lupane District, Matabeleland North Province are working on starting an irrigation scheme through harnessing water from a hot spring situated within a former safari farm in their area.
The villagers are part of thousands of people in the country that benefitted from Government’s land reform programme aimed at distributing the resource equitable among the majority in the early 2000s.
Lupane just like all the districts in Matabeleland North is generally characterised by dry conditions and low rainfall.
Matabeleland North has low rainfall and the land is also less fertile compared to other provinces, as commercial crops cannot be grown and rural farmers usually cannot produce enough maize to feed their families thus the utilisation of any reliable water source for irrigation purposes is seen as one of the lasting solutions to mitigate food shortages.
Ten families drawn from Chimwara’s village III and IV have been irrigating their gardens using water drawn from the hot spring for over three years cropping maize and horticultural produce such as tomatoes, onions, chomolia and butternuts for consumption and for sale.
Although the water from the hot springs comes out searing by the time it reaches the first garden, which is about four kilometres from the source, it would have cooled enough to irrigate crops. The water is piped using a polyvinyl chloride pipe.
A hot spring is a spring produced by the emergence of geothermally heated groundwater that rises from the earth’s crust.
While some of these springs contain water that is the correct temperature for bathing, others are too hot to do so and immersion can result in injury or death.
“I have been growing maize, tomatoes and chomolia for consumption at home and selling the surplus to other villagers in the process generating income to send my children to school as well as buying a number of household apparatus,” said one of the villagers, Mrs Christella Tshuma.
Apart from irrigating crops, the villagers also use the hot spring water for household consumption and a source of water for their livestock.
However, the community’s leadership are now thinking of embarking on extensive irrigation project aimed at benefitting more households through exploiting water obtained from the natural resource.
He said the community was seeking assistance from well-wishers to assist in the acquisition of a pipe to draw water from the source to the irrigation scheme, a distance of about five-kilometres as well as purchasing a big tank or constructing a concrete water storage tank at the site of the project.
Lupane Women’s Centre (LWC) has, however, pledged to construct a concrete water reservoir for the villagers. Last year the organisation assisted the villagers to rehabilitate an off-take concrete structure, which was constructed on the mouth of the hot spring.
Matabeleland North Department of Agricultural Technical and Extension Services provincial officer Mr Dumisani Nyoni said the move by Chimwara villagers of harnessing water from a hot spring was a noble idea as it was likely to improve household food security in the community.
Online Reporter