Healthy Soil for a Better Harvest – Conservation Farming in Tsholotsho
The majority of farmers in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe rely on rain for their agricultural activities. When rains are poor or erratic, crops fail, harvests suffer, and people don’t have enough food to eat. Tsholotsho district in Matabeleland North is no exception. This area is characterized by low, unpredictable rainfall during the farming season and year-round arid conditions. Farmers are often forced to rely on alternative coping strategies, including remittances, paid casual labor, and craft-making, to make it through the lean season. However, cultivation methods based on low-till conservation agriculture (CA) promoted by the USAID-funded Amalima program are improving harvest yields in this dry environment and influencing many households in the process.
Cecilia Ncube, 66 years old, is a smallholder farmer in Zenzeleni village of Tsholotsho. She is a widower and lives with her three daughters and five small grandchildren. Several of her children are in South Africa and send back remittances on a monthly basis, which, combined with income from basket-making, is how Ncube survives. Concerned about her family’s precarious livelihood and food security situation, she decided to participate in the Amalima program’s CA training. “I am so excited that I am taking part in this conservation farming intervention. Before the Amalima program arrived, I would use draught power to till most of my land. I would have to wait for other villagers to finish plowing their fields before they would let me borrow their oxen. I realized that every time I was plowing too late, well after the planting rains had gone, and more importantly, this method made the soils quickly dry off,” Ncube said.
Amalima builds on existing communal initiatives in order to improve household food security and nutrition through initiatives like conservation agriculture and livestock training, improving access to agricultural inputs, and strengthening community resilience to economic and climatic shocks. The Amalima program draws its name from the Ndebele word for the social contract by which families come together to help each other engage in productive activities such as land cultivation, livestock tending, and asset building.
Conservation agriculture is a set of soil management practices that minimize the disruption of the soil’s structure, composition, and natural biodiversity. CA has proven potential to increase crop yields while improving the long-term sustainability of farming. As part of land preparation, farmers dig planting basins rather than plowing the whole field and lay manure fertilizer in the basins before planting. This method of field preparation minimizes soil disturbance, consequently reducing erosion, and increasing moisture retention when the rain falls. Specific spacing guidelines also promote maximum yields. Amalima’s CA training covers land preparation methods, fertilizer application, planting, pest management, and post-harvest handling.
“At first, I thought this process was too labor intensive, and I didn’t see how I would be able to till a reasonable piece of land. But our mentors, Amalima field staff and AGRITEX [the Government of Zimbabwe’s agricultural extension team] Officers encouraged us to work in groups of ten so that we could assist each other with land preparation. Working this way, we were then able to work on one plot a day,” she explained. Ncube is now part of a conservation farming group made up of ten women in her village who also participated in the Amalima training. Soils around Zenzeleni village are sandy, and the group had to collect cow dung around the nearest watering borehole to place in their planting basins to enhance soil fertility and reduce the loss of soil nutrients from water run-off. According to Ncube’s group’s constitution, members provide assistance by preparing 0.5 hectares of each member’s field using CA techniques. As a result of this cooperation, Ncube managed to complete millet planting on her plot before the first rainfall in the 2014/2015 season and was excited to compare the results of her CA and conventional plots.
In January 2015, Ncube said, “With good rains this year, I am expecting to harvest 300 kilograms of millet on this 50-by-50 metered (0.3 hectares) piece of land. On the same piece of land, I used to get around 150 kilograms of millet using conventional farming.” A few months later, the sorghum in her CA plot was lush green in comparison to the crops in her conventional plot. Ncube lamented that if she had known that the millet in the CA plot would do so much better than in the conventional farming plot, she would have dug CA planting basins throughout her fields herself.
Unfortunately, the 2014/2015 season did not bring good rains—rainfall was 40% below normal in Tsholotsho—but Ncube’s small CA plot yielded 200 kilograms of millet despite the drought, which is more than double the yield of neighbors who used conventional methods on the same sized land. On her 1.7 hectares conventional farming plot, Ncube yielded 650 kilograms, which is only 3.5 times the yield on an area of land almost six times larger. Six months after her harvest, Ncube still had 100 kilograms of millet available for her family’s consumption.
After witnessing the increased yields from Ncube and her fellow group members’ CA plots, many new farmers from Zenzeleni village eagerly participated in CA training in July and Aug. and formed several new CA farmer groups for the upcoming growing season. Ncube’s CA farming group plans to expand their area of cultivation in the future using draught power and mechanized CA to prepare planting basins.
Ncube is using CA techniques on her entire two-hectare plot this year, explaining, “Since adopting CA, my yield was better even during a poor and erratic rainy season. CA is the best technology that I urge all community farmers to adopt. It has come as a revelation in addressing the challenge of food security both at household and community level especially for us households without any means of earning an income to feed the family.” As of early October, Ncube had already prepared 75% of her plot using CA techniques.
