Maravi

(HERALD) Stone Age agric practices can save life

COMMENT - People should check out Natural Farming or Natural Agriculture, pioneered by the late Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), and his books "The One Straw Revolution" and The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy.

Stone Age agric practices can save life
By Stephen Mpofu

TREE leaves turn yellow in autumn, drop to the ground, are trodden under feet, and decay. Soon after, however, fluffy new leaves pop out of buds to inherit the colour and purpose of their predecessors.

But not entirely so with people, when older generations yellow away, they bequeath no compulsory legacy for successive generations to consummate.

In fact, the onslaught on good old days by rapidly changing times with fast tracked technologies and marauding alien values, some of them quite decadent, persuade post modernity to dismiss some African practices as primitive.

It is however, those same "Stone Age" practices in vogue long before the advent of whites with their advanced technologies, which sustained our people when skies freaked at the wrong times, when they should have cracked smiles.

There is however, one African tradition that has stood the test of time, running neck-and-neck with modern ways albeit in a reconstituted form.

The extended family system, while now almost a pale shadow of its original self in the villages, survives in a somewhat vivacious manner in the urban set up as a reconstituted extended family system among neighbourhood families, some nuclear, with parents socialising after work.

Other almost forgotten, or neglected African practices come handy especially in agriculture in these times when the global weather has started to limp, limp, limp, diseased by dysfunctional human activities — witness erratic rainfall, droughts, floods, and chilly weather in summer; all these caused by global warming and climate change.

These days also, there are challenges faced especially by small-scale farmers and these include a lack of money to buy pesticides, a shortage of approved seed maize that also affect large-scale farmers, and a shortage of tillage equipment.
Peri-urban farming now under vigorous promotion, also falls into the spotlight here and should be addressed seriously.

This article should not be read as lamenting the use of advanced technologies in agricultural production.

On the contrary, it is a call, like the pressing call of nature for small-scale farmers to re-double their efforts in augmenting bigger farmers in boosting food security, which count more as national security.

In that regard, there is no excuse for either peasants or peri-urban farmers moaning about lack of tillage facilities in working their smallholdings because zero tillage has advantages that many people do not know about.

While weeds may be problematic initially, zero tillage is said by agricultural scientists to prevent run-off, meaning that rain water is prevented from washing away top soil from the field.

As a result, the soil is kept rich and more productive, according to the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics at the Matopos, south of Bulawayo.

Smallholder farmers should not starve either because of any failure to access approved seed due either to its unavailability or lack of money to buy the seed.
For many generations Zimbabwean villagers dug their hands into the granary and selected unspoilt open pollinated seed maize seed, which they planted and reaped handsome dividends as a result.

So, there is no reason why land should be allowed to remain fallow because the Government or some relevant agency have not made available tried and tested seed to plant either in the rural areas or indeed, in peri-urban areas where plots now register a hive of activity with residents trying to beat shortage of food.

Then there is mixed cropping which Zimbabweans now appear to shy away from, induced, no doubt by a desire for mega bucks realised from mechanised large-scale farming.
Mixed cropping has advantages that people have forgotten about, or are ignorant of because older generations died, like tree leaves, and were interred with knowledge about the benefits of that form of farming.

Researchers at Matopos say that growing runners such as pumpkins and cowpeas for instance, enable their leaves to subdue weeds so that maize or other crops in that mixed grill are not robbed of their food.

But much more importantly, this pen discovered during research at Cambridge University in 1984, while working as a Nuffield Press Fellow that mixed cropping "confuses pests".

Imagine an army of pests marching towards a crop field and salivating at the lush "green pastures" right before their smiling eyes attracted by the greens in it, on approaching the target pasture the pests suddenly stagger to a halt in complete despair not knowing which crop to attack.

So you (yes, you) you see how scientifically-minded our people have always been.
Thus that technology that served Zimbabweans for generation upon generation should not be allowed to die.

Instead it should be kept alive, like mafavuke, "the weed that refuses to die", like capitalism.

True, the yield from mixed cropping may be small, yet a much richer harvest. In the fullness of time, Zimbabwe's silos shall burst at the seams.

Labels: AGRICULTURE, MASANOBU FUKUOKA, NATURAL FARMING

posted by MrK @ 6:31 PM