The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
ONE of the real and enduring accusations levelled against farmers in new resettlement areas, which are in fact rightfully losing the “new” tag as they approach the 20-year-old mark, is the vandalism of agriculture infrastructure with reckless abandon.
The vandalised infrastructure includes among other things boundary and paddock fences, water reticulation pipes and engines as well as farm houses.
This vandalism has seen some previously vibrant farms being reduced to shells. Another challenge for the resettled areas especially in Matabeleland region is the disregarding of stocking rates and carrying capacities of farms.
The new farmers, some of them who previously didn’t own cattle, have been recruiting cattle for relief grazing in droves from desperate livestock farmers. They in turn receive payment in the form of heifers per every agreed number of cattle. This has seen some farms which are technically meant to carry around 100 animals carrying in excess of 300 animals, obviously with disastrous consequences on the veld.
After realising the effects of reckless veld management practices, farmers in Manama Farm in Ward 7 of Mangwe District decided to return law and order in their farm operations.
They embarked on a rigorous farm fences rehabilitation programme and abolished the practice of recruiting external animals for relief grazing. Consequently, their farm has managed to maintain their animals in a healthy body condition score against a background of massive poverty deaths in some neighbouring farms.
While some farms in the same ward and district such as Smithblock Farm are experiencing massive livestock losses due to poverty deaths, an unexpected occurrence in a resettlement area, Manama Farm is home to happy and content livestock farmers due to their prudence in farm and veld management practices.
Manama farmers held a field day to showcase their farm fences maintenance practices and the outcome thereafter. The field day, a unique one indeed, perhaps the first one of its kind in the country, was attended by high-powered district leadership which included the ward councillor, the local Member of Parliament, Mrs Mguni and the Minister of State in Vice-President’s Chiwenga’s Office, Mrs Evelyn Ndlovu.
The event provided a number of lessons for the farmers from the neighbouring farms. Among the lessons were the benefits of maintaining boundary and paddock fences and these are: it allows the farmers to practice proper grazing management principles such as rotational grazing.
This ensures that animals are not just left to roam the entire farm destroying the veld but they are guided to move from one paddock to another which makes the veld to endure from one season to another; the boundary fence keeps external animals out of their farm and this helps in keeping a healthy stocking rate and avoid overgrazing; with properly maintained fences farmers are able to adopt such practices as controlled breeding where their animals will only be given to bulls at certain times.
This means the farmers can now even buy a communal good quality bull and it services their herd in the protected paddocks. The fences also control disease spread as their cattle are not mixing with every stray animal. This protects their animals from such diseases as foot and mouth. Even stock theft cases are significantly reduced on farms that are properly fenced and the fences are maintained because it is not easy for thieves to drive the animals across a number of fenced paddocks yet in places that have the fences vandalised and stolen, animals can be driven for several kilometres with no intervening boundary fence.
A farm which is open and has animals coming from every direction to come and graze is prone to stock theft as the farmers do not even know which animals belong to that farm and which ones are not.
This opens the farm to thieves who easily drive animals out with no one taking notice. It is therefore without doubt that the Manama Farm fences field day provided very rich lessons to their contemporaries and this farm should be used as a model and a case study by the relevant agricultural departments and it should be replicated to all the resettled farms if we are to improve productivity in these farms.
Severe penalties should be given to farmers who have a farm with vandalised or stolen fence so that vigilance can be improved on resettled farms. We cannot let the previously productive farms be vandalised, overgrazed and deteriorated into tired villages we left on our communal lands.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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