Govt set to conduct national crop assessment Dr Anxious Masuka

Nqobile Tshili, Chronicle Reporter
GOVERNMENT will start conducting the national crop assessment in two weeks employing satellite technology, a Cabinet Minister has said.

The national crop assessment provides insights on the seasonal projections.

Signs are that the country is headed for another bumper harvest following the one that was recorded last season due to improved rainfalls.

In an interview last Friday, Lands, Agriculture, Water, Climate, Fisheries and Rural Development Dr Anxious Masuka said satellite technology was first employed in assessing winter wheat last year and it will be adopted in the national crop assessment this year.

Dr Masuka said the country will start the national crop assessment in two weeks’ time to allow all farmers to complete planting as the farming season started late.

“The season is late; we can’t start doing it when people are still planting. But we are going to do a combination of the physical that we have always done with Agritex and also satellite one. We started using satellite with winter wheat last season but now we are going to be doing it on a nationwide basis on other crops,” said Dr Masuka.

He said employing satellite technology will enable the country to obtain data in real time as opposed to the physical one which take time and was subject to human error.

“If we perfect the satellite system this will be real time. At a touch of a button, you will know how much maize has been planted throughout the country, the crop condition, the growth stages and in some instances, you will also be able to infer diseases,” he said.

“It can be extended even to migratory pest control where we will be able to use information communication technologies (ICTs) for better reaction and prevent damages. This is the way to go.

We call it the agriculture aggregated management system and it can also come in with what we call a high frequency monitoring system which will be able to predict disasters and then give you reaction times. So, it is really the way to go.”

The minister said going forward, Government should stop providing seed maize to farmers in Region 5 as farmers in this region always produce poor yields.

Instead, Dr Masuka said the farmers should focus on traditional grains such as sorghum, pearl millet and sunflower that thrive better under hot weather conditions.

“It is almost criminal for our extension system to be promoting maize in order for that maize to fail. We all know that agronomically Region 5 is not suitable for maize.

So, we encourage communities to produce crops that are ecologically suited, sorghum, pearl millet, groundnuts, sunflower and the prices have been adjusted for those crops to be 20 percent more than maize and for sunflower almost double the price,” said Dr Masuka.

“If any farmer in this region wants maize they must produce a lot of sorghum, they must produce a lot of pearl millet and take that for a swap at the Grain Marketing Board.”

He said due to climate change, communities in Region 5 cannot continue planting maize as their crop is likely to fail.

“With climate change it is no longer possible to grow what we want where we want. It is the climate which determines what must be grown in what area, not necessarily what we want. But fortunately, Zimbabwe is endowed with diverse agriculture regions.

There is Region 1 and 2 where maize thrives and you get high yields and those provinces must focus on producing such crops. Drier provinces must focus on what is agronomically suited to them and that is livestock and traditional grains,” he said.

Turning to livestock farming, Dr Masuka said there is a need to reduce livestock mortality.

He said a lot of animals are dying due to January disease, lumpy skin and other debilitating diseases.

He said as a result, Government is providing tick grease to at least one million livestock farmers and rehabilitating dip tanks while introducing a fodder scheme to improve stock feed.

“The third stage is the improvement in the genetics and with the improvement in the genetics, we accelerate that through artificial insemination to ensure that we can begin to build our herd.

So, my expectation is that from this year onwards we will then be able to build on the five million cattle that we have. The focus for this is Matabeleland region and also Masvingo and Midlands which have the drier parts of the country,” he said. — @nqotshili

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