The Sunday News
Mhlupeki Dube Farming Issues
ONE of the priorities preoccupying livestock practitioners and stakeholders in the industry is how to grow the national herd which seems to be on an exponential decline.
The national herd sits at about 5,3 million and the target is to push it to above 6 million in the next few years. Some players are already importing animals, mainly heifers from such countries as Namibia in obvious response to a gap in the market for such breeding stock. However one single important factor in growing the national herd is the calving percentage.
This is simply the number of cows that calve down in a year as a fraction of herd of cows.
The calving percentage for smallholder farmers who are the majority holders in the national herd is hovering around 36 percent.
This is a very low figure which means with a herd of 10 cows only four will give you calves in a year and the remaining six will not.
It is imperative therefore for livestock development strategy to begin to interrogate the issue of calving percentages in smallholder farmers and find answers to it.
Every livestock person worth mentioning will know that calving percentage is influenced by a number of factors working singularly or in interaction. These include such factors as breed type, nutrition, management and bull ratios.
I would like to discuss the last one a bit as I feel that if answers are found on this one, a lot of impact could be realised in the smallholder farming sector.
One thing that is painfully visible as one interacts with smallholder farmers especially in communal areas is that there are hardly any bulls running with the herds.
Never mind the breeds just any bull is hard to come by. Out of 20 homesteads with cattle you are lucky to find just one with a bull running with the herd. It therefore tells you that a lot of cows and heifers probably come in and out of heat without detection by a bull let alone servicing by the same. It is a no brainer that cows need a bull for them to conceive and subsequently calve. The national herd development strategy needs to incorporate ways of encouraging smallholder farmers to keep bulls for their herds. Admittedly good quality bulls cost an arm and two legs so to speak, with a working bull ranging from anything above $2 000 to $3 500. It is for this reason that other development players such as non-governmental organisations and private players should come in and support communal farmers with bulls if anything for the development and improvement on the quality of the national herd.
There is no harm in big industry players such as abattoir operators in donating some bulls to selected communal areas for the development of the herd. It is also in their interest that communal farmers should begin to produce and sell good animals as they will sell to them after all. If communal farmers produce good quality beef animals it means abattoirs and butchery operators will also sell good quality. Industry players can consider it part of their corporate social responsibility to support communal farmers with bulls.
Other development players can also come in with programmes to support smallholder communal farmers with bulls. This pen is fully aware of the amount of resources which will be required for this to happen but it’s time these organisation understood that it is better to take the bull by its horn and address fundamental challenges affecting the livestock sector than to keep tip-toeing around the problem opting to address small cheaper and obviously inconsequential challenges. A lot of these resources that are wasted on workshops, symposia and baseline surveys can actually be channelled towards procuring bulls for selected communal farmers and the results will be there for everyone to see. Modalities of how such bulls can be allocated and managed at a communal set up can be figured out. Researchers can now come in with their modelling, trials and pilots as it is their speciality. Bottom line; communal farmers need to be supported with bulls for improving both the calving percentage and the quality of breeds and thus movers and shakers of the industry should come in and lend a hand.
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