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FEEDING THE NATION
In August, the government of Zimbabwe began piloting the caving program as part of a plan that aims to reach 1.8 million households by the end of the 2020/2021 farming season with seeds, fertilizers and training.
Farmers began sowing with the method this month, agreeing to use it on three small plots, each about 620 square meters (0.06 ha), two dedicated to cereal crops and the third to oilseeds or legumes, such as sunflower. , sesame and soy.
The holes are arranged in 52 rows, one for each week of the year, said agronomist Nhongonhema.
If done to the expected standard, a household should be able to harvest enough grain of corn from each row to feed a family of six for a full week, he added.
The goal is to meet nearly 90% of Zimbabwe’s annual national food requirements, said Davison Masendeke, Matabeleland North lead agronomist in the department of agricultural extension services.
Winston Babbage, vice president of the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union, said caving was “a good agricultural concept” and had the potential to improve yields for all types of farmers across the country, from subsistence to commercial.
LOW RECORD RAIN
Finding ways to grow food using less water is a major concern for farmers in Zimbabwe, where unpredictable rains have increasingly affected the agricultural sector, compounding the impacts of an ongoing economic crisis.
According to a crop report released by the Global Agricultural Monitoring initiative in February, the rainy season from October to December 2019 was one of the driest on record.
That “severely affected crop prospects,” because farmers either lost crops or decided not to plant them at all, he said.
In the 2018/2019 season, farm households produced about a third less corn than the previous year, according to a report by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, a government-led advisory group.
He attributed that deficit to a combination of erratic and insufficient rains, a struggling economy and lack of access to agricultural resources.
“The pfumvudza concept is key to enabling (small-scale) farmers to secure their livelihoods,” said Innocent Katsande, who coordinates knowledge management for the development organization Practical Action.
It helps farmers “strengthen their resilience to the harsh conditions they find themselves in,” he added.
Practical Action launched its own conservation agriculture project two years ago in three eastern districts, Mutare, Makoni and Mutasa, and trained more than 79,000 farmers to use spelunking when it ended in September, Katsande said.
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