Chronicle Editor
Mhlupheki Dube
AS I keep interacting with livestock farmers almost on a daily basis in various places and platforms, one major observation has come to my mind. It has come to my attention that other than cruel markets the other serious challenges that are faced by these farmers is the unavailability of readily accessible extension services.
I am talking here of hardcore real practical hands on extension, not the notebook easy stuff extension. I get a call from a stressed farmer who has a uterine prolapse case and has no clue how to deal with it; a farmer with a real time dystocia case needing assistance and he has nowhere to go; a farmer with a cow which is rejecting its new-born calf such that the calf cannot suckle, another farmer whose cow with a calf on foot has just incurred a fracture on its hind leg after falling into an open pit.
The fractured cow can hardly walk on its own let alone nurse the calf. The farmer faces a real possibility of losing two animals. These are just but a few examples of practical challenges that farmers face and sadly extension services providers are usually far away to provide the needed help.
In the absence of another experienced farmer in the vicinity, the result is also the same, a loss to the affected farmer.
The question therefore becomes, how can we make sure farmers can access critical extension services when they need them even in the absence of a Government extension worker? Smallholder livestock farmers need to find an answer to this important question as it will help solve most of their emergencies regarding extension services help.
It is my submission that smallholder livestock farmers who are mostly in communal lands set ups or in resettlement areas should seriously consider having a designated fellow farmer and resident villager to be trained and equipped to deal with most of the challenges that I alluded to above.
Farmers should sponsor that training and be willing to pay nominal rates for the services that this village level extension person will provide.
It will take a lot of time for Government to be able to deploy extension officers that can be resident at village level and hence farmers need to do this for themselves. Once a designated villager is identified and taken for short course training in one of the many agricultural institutions we have in the country, the person can go back and provide very important frontline services for the livestock farmers in his village.
This will not be a once-off training but the person can be taken back for refresher courses and catch up on new practices and technologies that may be evolving. However, the key to this is to elect a person who is not selfish and also not lazy because you don’t want to send somebody for training and when farmers now call him or her for emergencies, he or she provides an excuse of not attending.
Some community members have had this strategy tried out by a non-governmental organisation who trained what they termed paravets, for intervening in the absence of extension officers. There were, however, a myriad of challenges with these paravets in other areas simply because of poor selection of the persons to be trained.
A councillor would simply send his wife or some relative to go for the training because the invitation letter goes to the councillor. In some cases, the chosen people would not have animals of their own and they are expected to have interest in other villagers’ animals.
As a result, the model could not function in the anticipated way but it is my conviction that the model is not defective but proper selection of the candidate to be trained should be made so that the person will come back and do exactly what is expected of him or her.
Otherwise farmers will continue to lose animals to emergent but rectifiable issues that just require appropriate extension services to be provided on time. Sadly, due to distance and other factors such as mobility and low motivation level, extension officers may not always be available to provide the frontline services that farmers would definitely need when faced with issues such as those mentioned at the begging of this article.
Smallholder livestock farmers should invest in training their own village-based helper because in most cases owners of the animals are not resident where their animals are, in fact there is usually a herdboy or an old relative who is tasked with looking after the animals but will not be able to provide the required help when the need arises.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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