Online Reporter
George Maponga
Masvingo Bureau
IN the heart of Chiwara communal lands, about 70km from Mpandawana town in Gutu, is an agricultural revolution that has taken the rural enclave by storm.
Chiwara falls under agro-ecological region 4, making the area largely eligible when it comes to serious commercial crop farming.
However, at Farm 73 on the northern fringes of Majada business centre in the Chiwara rural heartland, a bumper maize crop that is spread on nearly 5 hectares is ready for harvest.
Farm 73 is owned and run by the Chief Secretary in the Office of the President and Cabinet, Dr Martin Rushwaya and his wife, Rainah.
The couple is daring to dream, and a mixed farming revolution at their farm has left the entire Chiwara community spellbound.
Dr Rushwaya will soon start harvesting his maize crop straddling over 5 hectares and is expecting not less than 50 tonnes of maize, a major boost for food security in the arid Chiwara.
He is indeed leading from the front in the implementation of the Second Republic’s “Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo” mantra.
The stover from the maize crop will be ground and mixed with other locally-sourced materials to make livestock food.
Sourcing additional material for alloying with maize stover helps supplement incomes for local rural communities while also boosting Dr Rushwaya’s cattle fattening enterprise.
“Our farm has integrated operations, and we are slowly mechanising. We make our feed here(at Farm 73), where we process the maize stover and mix it with other materials that are supplied by local villagers so that the feed is highly nutritious for our cattle and goats,” said the farm manager, Mr Mohammed Gobvu.
“We do cattle and goat fattening here and supply the market with meat. We also create direct and indirect employment when we do our farming operations, and this also helps in transferring the latest farming skills to the surrounding communities where we draw our contract labour from.”
Dr Rushwaya and his wife own hundreds of cattle at Farm 73, where a highly mechanised system enables the cattle to be dipped to prevent the spread of diseases.
The Rushwayas also want to be major suppliers of goat meat in the near future.
“We want to make sure that we increase the number of employees at our farm here and also inspire local communities here to embrace modern methods of farming and help feed the nation in line with Vision 2030.”
For Mrs Rushwaya, their farming enterprise at Farm 73 is the family’s contribution to make Zimbabwe an upper-middle-income economy by 2030 in sync with President Mnangagwa’s vision.
“We are expecting a bumper maize crop of about 8 plus tonnes of maize per hectare from the 5ha that we put under maize. We get our labour locally, and we also tap expertise from local agricultural extension officers,” said Mrs Rushwaya. She said the overall objective was to help grow the economy by benefiting their farm produce.
“At a local level, our farming enterprise helps create jobs for local people who also benefit from tapping into the latest farming methods that we employ here.”
“At a national level, our goal is to value-add our goat meat, beef and maize so that we produce mealie-meal and beef products, including even butter, that we supply to local businesses in the short to medium term, and this is what the President means when he talks about the “Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo” mantra,” added Mrs Rushwaya.
The developments at Farm 73 in Chiwara have courted the attention of the Government, with the Masvingo provincial leadership excited by developments at Dr Rushwaya’s farm.
Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister Ezra Chadzamira praised Dr Rushwaya, noting that agriculture, together with mining and tourism, constituted a triad of planks under the province’s dream to move into a US$8 billion economy by the year 2030.
The director of Coordination of Government Programmes in the Office of Masvingo Provincial Affairs and Devolution, Ms Rosemary Chingwe, commended the Rushwayas for heeding President Mnangagwa’s Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo call.
Ms Chingwe described Farm 73 as a model project that spoke to the Second Republic’s rural industrialisation drive.
“This is a classic example of how we can develop our rural areas in line with the Government’s rural modernisation drive. At Farm 73, they produce their own livestock feed to fatten cattle and goats, and they also produce the staple maize crop at commercial levels, which means people here in Chiwara will never go hungry,” she said.
“Our goal as a province is to grow our provincial gross domestic product to reach our target of US$8 billion by the year 2030, and what Dr Rushwaya is doing here will help us meet that target, especially if more people take a leaf from him.”
According to Ms Chingwe, operations at Farm 73 in Chiwara were a model on how the country as a whole can ramp up agricultural production and stem food imports and make Zimbabwe a net food exporter as the country eyes upper-middle-income society status by the year 2030.
Mupinga village head in Chiwara, Mr Onias Mupinga, was full of praise for Dr Rushwaya, praising the senior civil servant for leading from the front.
