The Sunday News
Farming Issues, Mhlupheki Dube
THIS week one respected breeder will be holding his traditional annual end of October bull sale. It is an event that I hardly miss even though I may be out of the league in terms of buyers. It is an event that I will encourage anyone who wishes to go into cattle ranching to calendarise and attend.
There are always many lessons to get from this top- of-range breeders sale. It is an event that can give a detailed picture to anyone who is contemplating going into cattle ranching especially in terms of the passion and the commitment that one needs to invest when she or he decides to go into cattle production business. It is in itself a learning event where the who is who in the cattle industry interact and share notes on key issues and strategies.
In this event you can begin to understand and appreciate the amount of investment that any serious farmer worth his salt has to make for them to produce high quality top of the range animals. It is an event that has the net effect of re-energising and re-dedicating a farmer. It is important for farmers to understand the level of responsibility they gave to the nation at large in terms of producing quality products.
If retailers walk into a butchery and buy excellent succulent meat, it’s because a farmer somewhere took his time to produce an excellent product. While I appreciate that the livestock industry is full of fly by night producers and tired professionals who invariably have not been so successful in their chosen fields and hence choose to retire into cattle ranching, the reality is that it is an industry that needs serious investment both in resources and commitment.
The bull sale which by the way usually comes with high quality heifers, also helps to provide testimony that you can still find a niche in the beef value chain and do extremely well in that niche. It is not always about doing everything in the value chain but doing extremely well in whatever part of the chain you are so that you become the ultimate authority in that section.
I know prophets of doom and gloom will spring to their defences and immediately point out that these guys have been in breeding for over 50 years and they have just been doing it for 20 years!
We have discussed before on this platform of the need for farmers to improve their breeds so that we have more quality than we have quantity. One sure method of improving one’s breed is to invest in a properly selected and bred bull that will bring better genetics into your herd.
If I had the means I would force-march our Government under the command agriculture which at the present moment should be properly named command crop production, to purchase bulls such as those from the bull sale and infuse real genetics into places like Matabeleland North where the breeds can only be described as at best pathetic and at worst appalling.
It is a well-known and accepted fact that the majority of cattle are with the smallholder farmers yet this is where we also have the worst breeds. Is it really rocket science that if we are to make giant improvements in the quality of animals in our national herd we must target the smallholder farmers?
What better way can be there than making sure we have interventions that seek to bring better genetics into the sorry communal herd? At the risk of sounding repetitive I once again implore powers that be to firstly understand agriculture as meaning both crop and livestock production and secondly to tailor make products for livestock farmers.
They must disabuse themselves of this very simplistic understanding of food security as being only equal to crop production.
Food security is also very equal to livestock production. A livestock farmer can be very food secure without even tilling an acre. All he needs to do is produce good quality animals, sell one and buy two tonnes of maize! This surely is not calculus but the simplest of math. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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