admin
Edgar Vhera Agriculture Specialist Writer
ON the backdrop of escalating climate change challenges that continue to threaten the future of rain-fed agriculture, farmers have urged Government, private sector and development partners to develop micro-irrigation kits to enable dry land farmers to tame the harsh effects of climate change and practise all-year round production as well.
This came out during the annual national agribusiness conference held at the 113th edition of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show (ZAS) in Harare recently.
Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) secretary general Mr Paul Zakariya challenged all stakeholders to work together and ensure micro-irrigation kits were manufactured and installed to give impetus to irrigation development throughout the country.
“As a farmer, I am begging those with the capacity to invest in micro-irrigation kits to do so. This can help ensure food and nutrition security, apart from taming the effects of climate change. If farmers have adequate moisture, they will find seed to plant on their portions of land throughout the year and liberate themselves from poverty in line with the Vision 2030 objective,” Mr Zakariya said.
Drip is a type of micro-irrigation system that has the potential to save water and nutrients by allowing water to drip slowly to the roots of plants, either from above or below the soil surface. This places the water directly into the root zone and minimise evaporation.
Mr Zakariya criticised the hosting of high level climate change conferences that come up with resolutions to mitigate climate change yet the farmers who bear the brunt of climate change are not invited.
“When climate change conferences are held, I always find it difficult to understand why the farmer is not invited to add his voice and pulse to the proceedings. Big words such as carbon sequestration and adaptation, which the farmer does not understand, are used in efforts to find solutions the climate change problem,” he said.
He said ZFU had been directly involved in the implementation of climate change adaptation initiatives since 2009 under the Union Project funded by European Union (EU), farmer-led scaling up of conservation agriculture adoption funded by Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), information and communication technologies (ICT) based climate resilient solutions funded by Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) advocacy funded by Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU/NORAD).
“ZFU successfully implemented a conservation agriculture (CA) project in six of Zimbabwe’s districts between 2013-2017 to upscale its adoption through the design of innovative ways of using youths as agents of change in youth farmer clubs. Over 8 000 farmers benefitted from the project through establishment of CA demonstration plots within a period of four years,” the ZFU boss said.
Mr Zakariya cited the limited access to mechanised systems to support CSA as the main impediment to mitigate effects of climate change.
Manufacturers of heavy tractors are including attachments such as ploughs that disturb soil structure, he said.
The Government has upped its climate change fight by constructing dams to enable irrigation of crops. This has seen increased production of wheat under irrigation from last year’s 80 885 to over 90 000 hectares this year.
The ‘dam is not the project, but what the water is intended to do’ concept introduced by President Mnangagwa has seen the area under irrigation rising 29 percent from 150 000 hectares in 2020 to 193 000 hectares in 2022.
Department of Agricultural Engineering, Mechanisation and Soil Conservation chief director, Mr Edwin Zimhunga recently said the Government was crowding in the private sector under the Agricultural Mechanisation Development Alliance (AMDA) project to produce scale-appropriate technology, like 15 to 50 horse power tractors, from a smallholder farmer perspective.
“A power tiller being used for tilling a small piece of land is more appropriate than a tractor and plough aggregate. Likewise, the use of a mini-combine would be more scale appropriate for a small rice farm than a big combine harvester,” he said.
Scale-appropriate mechanisation means that the equipment promoted and used suits the needs of the smallholder farmer in terms of farm size and general production conditions.
Mechanisation increases operational efficiency and productivity, as farming operations can be executed more effectively. The use of a two-wheel tractor and CSA implements will reduce drudgery in Pfumvudza/Intwasa potholing exercise as well as maintaining soil structure.
Online Reporter