The Sunday News
Senior Farming Reporter
THE Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM) has managed to improve household food security in most communities in Hwange District over the past decade through its land and livestock management programmes.
ACHM facilitator Mr Elias Ncube said since 2005 the organisation has successfully used communities’ livestock to heal or restore degraded pieces of land for the purposes of increased forage as well as restoring water catchment and riverflows. Through the concept animals are assured of adequate grazing land and sufficient water supplies.
ACHM is a non-governmental organisation which was founded in 1992 by Mr Allan Savory, a former wildlife biologist, farmer and politician.
Its objective is to support holistic land and livestock management in Southern Africa through innovative training and outreach programmes based on a practical learning site that provides evidence of land, water and wildlife restoration using livestock.
“Through a unique planning methodology, livestock are used as a tool for land restoration. We combine livestock into large herds to harness the power of their hooves to break up hard ground so that air and water can penetrate.
“Livestock trample old grass so the soil is covered and less prone to the drying effects of sun and wind. Their dung and urine help enrich the hoof-prepared soil. Their grazing (which is timed to prevent over grazing) keeps perennial grasses healthy. This minimises the need to burn and expose soil,” Mr Ncube said.
The grouping of communities’ livestock is also used to improve crop field soils with animal impact most suitable for farmers or organisations that promote conservation agriculture.
Through this concept community livestock are penned on successive crop fields at night for about seven days to break up the soil with their hooves and deposit dung and urine following harvest and stover (crop residue) feeding.
“This treatment has more than doubled (five times, in some cases) the yields compared to community control fields.
“Animal impacting makes abandoned fields usable again. It also eliminates the labour required to transport manure to the field,” Mr Ncube said.
He said the penning of livestock using boma sheets also protects them from predatory wild animals such as lions which are predominant in Hwange district due to the presence of the Hwange National Park and a number of small sanctuaries. The penning of the animals together also makes it easy to administer vaccination programmes.
ACHM is presently spearheading the programme in Gurambira, Chemabanda and Simangani through Global Environment Facility’s small grants unit though it has previously rolled it out to a number of villages over the years.
Another facilitator Mrs Precious Phiri said as part of ensuring the readily available water to livestock ACHM has opened a number of water points in communities it has worked with.
“We have provided water points to a number of villages especially where there is a critical challenge. We have had to drill boreholes, instal pumps in some cases and even rehabilitate non-functioning ones.
“We have even enacted water reservoirs with a capacity to store 76 000 litres in each water point because in the event of a borehole failing to function animals should have one week access of water,” Mrs Phiri said.
The organisation encourages villagers to also set up gardens to enhance their household food security as well as generating income.
“This programme has impacted on 72 000 hectares of land and 110 000 individuals in the district. Chiefs have been very instrumental in embracing this programme through inviting us to facilitate it in their communities. We are also working with 15 organisations on the continent which have worked in 68 communities,” Mrs Phiri said.
A villager from Sizinda, Mr Mathew Mathe said most villagers have over the years managed to get good yields from their cropping activities through ACHM’s programme.
“Most families have managed to improve their crop yield due to the fact that the fertility of their fields will have been improved by penning most of the community’s cattle on their land as a result there will be readily available manure.
“A number of families have also managed to improve their livelihood through setting up horticultural gardens at the water points that were developed by ACHM. This has assisted them to improve nutritional levels at their homes as well as selling some of the crop for income generation purposes,” he said.
In 2010 ACHM won the international Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which awards a $100 000 annual prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has “significant potential to solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems”.
In 2014 ACHM won the Humanitarian Water and Food Award (Demark) as a “leading edge innovator in food security.”
