Rutendo Nyeve, Sunday News Reporter
THE Government has rolled out the second round of the Crop, Fisheries and Livestock Assessment that is designed to avail information on the 2023/24 farming season’s performance in relation to the national agricultural and food security targets.
Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Lands, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development Professor Obert Jiri told Sunday News that the assessment exercise commenced on Monday last week and they are expecting preliminary results this week.
“The Ministry is currently carrying out the second crop, livestock and fisheries assessment which is supposed to give us the levels of production and productivity. We are carrying it out this week (last week) and we should be able to get preliminary results soon after the Easter holidays (this week) to enable us to see what is the level of production in all the sectors and subsectors.
“We should be able to get how much we produced in terms of maize, traditional grains and in terms of livestock and fisheries. Currently our teams are out there in every ward collecting data and ensuring that the data will be verified then we can produce the first draft which will give us the indicative figures for the production levels,” said Prof Jiri.
With the nation waits for detailed results from the assessment report, Prof Jiri said climate proofing at household level is very critical and what they have been advocating is to encourage farmers that they have to follow agro-ecological tailoring which means that the agro-ecological region must detect what a farmer grows and not what the farmer requires.
“We have been encouraging planting of traditional grains in natural regions four and five and parts of three. Those are dry regions which we know that in terms of crop stability, they are suitable for traditional grains. For those farmers who did traditional grains in those regions, they are harvesting something. We know that in some parts there was a prolonged dry spell which led to the write off of some crops but for traditional grains we have got less than thirty percent right off in terms of the crops that were affected by the dry spell. In the face of prolonged dry spells, traditional grains still soldiered on,” said Prof Jiri.
Crop and livestock assessment is one of the early warning methods to forecast the national food security status. It gives a snapshot of the performance of the sector and the different specific sub-sectors of the agricultural economy.
Agricultural extension officers are the principal enumerators who are collecting data from randomly sampled farmers in every ward of the 1 600 rural wards.
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