Large herds, small pieces of land; a call to rethink the paradigm

22 May, 2022 - 00:05 0 Views
Large herds, small pieces of land; a call to rethink the paradigm

The Sunday News

READING a story in our sister paper, Chronicle about the successful farmer, Mr Thabani Sibanda who is running a 400 herd at his farm and is in serious need of land to accommodate his growing herd, made me think about opening the issue up for discussion on this platform.

Mr Sibanda has an 800 hectare farm, which means technically he is supposed to keep 80 livestock units (LUs). One LU is equivalent to 500kg, which means it could be one animal or at least one-and-a-half depending on what breed and size of animals you have.

There are many farmers in this part of the country who identify with Mr Sibanda’s predicament of having more animals than your piece of land can hold. Even in communal farmers, most of us who grew up in those environments would probably remember one or two livestock farmers who were always frowned upon by the majority of communal farmers because they felt that their large herds were wiping off grazing lands.

They simply had too many animals that their area could carry. The point is, as livestock farmers and as agricultural experts we need to come up with new production systems that can still allow farmers with large herds to thrive within their constrained space. The land has probably reached its elastic limit and hence it can no longer stretch to accommodate more farmers.

Land

It is probably unlikely that a livestock farmer running a herd of 500 would get what he needs in terms of land size.

The important question is, what should this farmer do so that he is still able to keep the number of animals he needs to be viable, on the same piece of land.

This calls for livestock farmers to drift from very extensive type of production to a production system that leans towards intensive production. Extensive system needs large pieces of land while intensive systems use smaller sizes of land. Intensive systems are traditional for crop production especially horticulture and some other forms of livestock such as poultry and pig production.

However, even in cattle production farmers are now adopting some production practices which allows them to run large herds of cattle in smaller sizes of land. We have seen beef farmers now growing crops for silage production and actually producing several tonnes of silage for dry season feeding.

Silage production has traditionally been done by dairy farmers but now even beef farmers are adopting its production for the purpose of stockpiling feed that will come in very handy during the lean season.

So, if you were able to put five hectares of land under silage crop and produce yourself over 30 tonnes of silage, you will have improved the carrying capacity of your farm almost tenfold! Admittedly we have rainfall issues but where we have means and perhaps, we receive just enough rains, I would implore farmers to seriously consider silage production for dry season management of their animals.

Another important aspect which livestock farmers especially with large herds should consider, is to reinforce their pastures with prolific growing palatable grass species. There are a number of possible grasses which we could try in our farms and our research stations are more than happy to share on these grasses.

It is not bad practice for a livestock farmer to buy seed of good grasses and plant them within your veld, before you know it you will be having a well-established pasture that can support more animals. We need to take active action to improve our pastures so that we can improve the quality of grasses and increase the carrying capacity of our rangelands.

Pigs

This will permit us to keep the number of heads we need. I am alive to the fact that it is no easy task to ask a livestock farmer to trim his/her herd hence my approach to target improving the pastures instead.

While I may not be able to provide all the answers, what is very certain is that as livestock farmers we need to find means of production which allows us to keep our large herds in our small pieces of land.

The land sizes can only get smaller as the human population increases and thus, we need to be innovative so that we maintain the same levels of production size but in smaller pieces of land. If we do not innovate, soon we will be struggling to get land to raise more than 10 animals.

Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.

Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback [email protected]/ cell 0772851275

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