The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
THE dry season is fast approaching and some of the watering points will dry up forcing farmers to seek alternative water sources for their livestock.
Some of the water sources will be far from where these farmers are based. The landscape will soon not show signs that there was once a lot of water in rivers and in some cases human lives were lost due to floods. This is the tragedy of our incapacity as it relates to water harvesting. We watch as water flows to the oceans with little or no efforts to harness and harvest it for future use.
Those that are responsible seem to have read one method of water harvesting that is dam creation and cannot think of any other method which can be appropriate for smallholder farmers. It is such disengagement from necessary thought processes that result in farmers always finding themselves facing the same problem year after year.
My question is what is being done to assist the nation in general with water harvesting and livestock farmers in particular with water for their animals.
It is no secret that dam construction is an expensive process and in some cases there may be no viable rivers. This means alternative methods of water harvesting should be explored and adopted. Animals in communal areas hoof for several kilometers to watering points and in the process waste away.
This is the major contributory factor to livestock death during the dry season. If some desert countries can harvest water from the little rain they receive and manage to grow crops and keep animals to the levels of exporting their produce why are we failing to harvest our own water from such abundant supply?
Where are our water and civil engineers and what are they doing to help the country in this regard? I had the privilege of witnessing some brilliant work by some organisations that sunk boreholes and provided solar powered water reticulation systems for watering animals. Shouldn’t Government be learning from such projects and perhaps upscale such efforts in interventions such as command livestock.
I am one person who is strongly against tokenized help especially from Government. Therefore my call will be for Government to tackle bigger issues which smallholder farmers may not be able to deal with on their own and let the farmers tackle the small issue. Hay bales for example cost between $2,50 and $3,00 and any serious farmer should be able to buy those and save his animals from starvation but sinking a borehole and powering it with solar will definitely cost thousands of dollars which may be out of reach for many farmers.
This is what the Government should carry in such programmes as command livestock not $2 hay bales!
If such Government departments such as the District Development Fund (DDF) are activated every year to provide tillage assistance to communal farmers why can’t the same department be activated to provide water solutions to smallholder livestock farmers?
We cannot have a complete department that is represented in every district of the country reducing its self to borehole repairs.
The department can and should do more for livestock farmers. It’s no rocket science that water provision is pivotal in any beef production system and any authority that does not recognize this simple fact should have a relook on its mandate.
Smallholder farmers are even failing to adopt some of the important and useful technologies such as pen fattening because of distances to watering points in communal areas.
On a separate note, I have attended a number of agricultural shows that are conducted at ward level in communal areas and I think more needs to be done to make them life changing for smallholder farmers. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the shows are a mere fulfillment of an activity on a Government extension officer’s activity calendar.
The objectives are not clearly articulated to the participating farmers and even the officers themselves cannot tell you anything other than that they are building to a higher level agricultural show. It is my feeling that these shows are strong teaching and learning platforms and hence a thorough effort should be invested in making sure that they achieve the purpose rather than merely ticking the box on the activity calendar! Uyabonga umntaMaKhumalo.
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