The Sunday News
Farming issues, Mhlupheki Dube
My interaction with a number of smallholder communal livestock farmers across most of Matabeleland has shown that most communities have standing local level by-laws regarding the utilisation of rangelands.
While the grazing practice is largely random with no defined rotational systems, there exist control measures regarding which section of the rangeland is accessible to livestock during which times of the year.
This is enforced by local level by-laws which have varying levels of enforceability across communities.
One common thing about these local level grazing restrictions is that during the cropping season animals are not allowed to graze anywhere near the fields, for obvious reasons of straying into the crop fields and damaging crops in the fields.
Animals are then grazed in some forests during this season and usually these forests are far from the homesteads.
However, because these forests are very dense in woody vegetation species, they tend to have poor undergrowth and there is hardly any grass for the animals.
In some areas these seasonal grazing restrictions including prohibiting animals to graze along the riverine areas in order to allow for growth and preservation of the grass around and along the river banks.
This is the grass that will then be available to animals during the dry season.
So, animals will only be able to graze the plenty and properly grown grasses around the crop fields and the riverine areas during winter season when the grass is already dry!
The immediate disadvantage of this approach notwithstanding the positive effect towards veld preservation, is that animals miss the opportunity to graze the grass when it is at its maximum nutritive value.
It is an established fact that the green actively growing grass has far much better nutritive value than the dry grass and the nutritive value reaches its peak just before seed setting.
This means that your animals, because of such grazing restrictions, miss the opportunity to graze nutritious grasses and improve body condition faster.
It’s no wonder that some animals go through the summer season without attaining the best body condition as they should since this is a season of plenty.
Consequently, your animals will not go into breeding and you will miss the whole year.
The better practice therefore would be not to completely close off these rich grazing areas but perhaps to allow animals a few days say after two weeks to come and graze along those closed off areas such as the riverine area and open spaces around cropping fields.
This will ensure that your animals get to utilise the grass when it is at its best nutritive value and benefit from the nutrition rather than only coming to graze it when its dry and deteriorating in nutritive value.
That communities have local level by-laws to control grazing around different sections of the rangeland is very plausible however, they need to be assisted so that the control is not only driven by the need to preserve grass for the lean season but it should also be informed by animal nutrition considerations and the wider effect it has on the reproduction of the herd.
Rangeland management has always been a difficult issue in communal areas because of the very nature of communally owned resources, but this pen is convinced that working on the already existing systems and practices by the smallholder farmers, tweaking the practices to be informed by both good rangeland management practices and animal nutrition, a middle ground can be found with possible tremendous results.
The question being how can we as livestock practitioners upgrade the current rangeland management system among communal smallholder farmers to a better model that recognises the key tenets of rangeland management but still acknowledges and respects the complexities of a communal set up?
Having said that, may I take this opportunity to wish livestock farmers in particular and readers of this column in general, a happy and productive new year. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback [email protected] cell 0772851275
