Chronicle Editor
Lungelo Ndhlovu, Sunday News Correspondent
Mr Nelson Mudzingwa’s homestead in Masvingo province’s Shashe mining village welcomes visitors with a delightful green setting dotted with orange trees, a variety of green vegetables, pawpaw trees, banana trees, goat and cattle pens, and two fish ponds.
“We have horticulture here, which produces vegetables, fruits, and bee hives, a seed bank and eco-tourism, as well as aquaculture, which primarily focuses on fish, farmer training programmes, and livestock,” he explained.
Mr Mudzingwa, a small-scale farmer, is an expert in agroecology, a form of agriculture that emphasises interactions between species of various classifications, such as plants, animals, people, and the environment.
“Within the Shashe blocks of farms we have the Shashe Agroecology School. This is an initiative by the local farmers, those that have gone onto the new land, the new land that we acquired through the Government-supported land reform programme in 2000.
“As we acquired the new land, we already had a wealth of experience regarding our relationship with the vital key resources that God has created, including the earth’s waters, soils, and all biological resources, flora, and fauna that are contained in our mother earth,” Mr Mudzingwa, said in an interview at his homestead.
“We are all part of a connected ecology. We chose to build the Shashe Agroecology School on the new land, which is 184 hectares divided between two families, each of whom has a farm within a farm.
“Although 184 hectares were shared among 12 people, there is also space reserved for grazing livestock because the location is a desert and receives only 400 millimetres of rain on average each year,” Mr Mudzingwa said.
Mrs Elizabeth Mpofu, a smallholder farmer and the chairperson of the Shashe Agroecology School said their community created these centres of excellence so that they could share their experiences with other farmers in Shashe communities and across the country.
“We also host farmers who come from different nations, such as South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, and Lusaka, to learn about agroecology. For us, agroecology is something that we think was given to us by our ancestors, who we believe had been using it for a very long time. It means using what is around you; we don’t even consider going to buy fertiliser or seeds, instead we use what is around us and our traditional seeds,” she said.
Smallholder farmers in the Shashe area are also preserving all historical varieties of corn, coffee beans, chillies, vegetable seeds, sunflowers, and other crops, and according to Mr Mudzingwa, their seed bank distributes free seeds to communities, who then return new seeds to the bank after harvest.
“Since the year 2000, we have not purchased any seed from stores, instead, we rely on our own high-quality seeds from crops that we collect from our agroecology activities,” he said.
Mrs Happymore Mudyahoto, a villager leader under the Chieftainship of Bere, indicated that community members in the Shashe block of farms began practicing agroecology in 2001, learning how to cultivate crops without the use of fertilisers, as well as farming all types of traditional seeds despite the prolonged dry spells faced by farmers in Masvingo.
“We are very happy with agroecology because our soils work well with traditional small grains. We have harvested enough crops from the previous farming season, to last us till the next season by cultivating traditional small grains, which is also good for our health because we eat traditional foods.
“For example, we have peanuts to make peanut butter or mutakura. Peanut butter and beans can also be used as relish, as porridge, and they are suitable for those suffering from diabetes.
“We do all this farming (agroecology) without the use of fertilisers and the small seed crops are drought resistant and they don’t take long to mature as compared to the maize crop,” Mrs Mudyahoto said.
Mr Mudzingwa agreed with Mrs Mudyahoto’s assessment that in order for Masvingo’s smallholder farmers to attain food sovereignty, they must completely adopt agroecology.
“Agroecology is a practice that farmers must adopt if they want to attain food sovereignty. When we discuss food sovereignty, we are referring to the variety of foods that we must eat in order to obtain the balanced nutrition that each and every household must provide.
“I have personally significantly decreased my purchasing expenses; we only purchase a few items that are not produced by us like salt; the remainder is derived from the land,” he said.
The Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) organisation, which works with women small holder farmers, has formed partnerships with smallholder farmers in Masvingo to promote small grains, water conservation, and support the Shashe Agroecology School.
According to Mr Simba Guzha, the programme manager for VSO, their organisation collaborates with farmer networks, farmer movements, and small-scale farmers because they have been hardest hit by climate change and the related food inflation crisis.
“We are also capacitating or training farmers so that they increase their resilience and adapt to this climate change through growing small grains which are drought tolerant and also disease tolerant.
“You will find that most of the custodians of the small grains are women, so we also try to empower women by growing this crop so that they can improve in terms of food security at household level.
“We would like to push for agroecology to be recognised as part of the action plans in our climate change adaptation plans,” he said.
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