01 Sep 2019

It is evident that more farmers have advanced towards understanding the meaning of production per unit area.

“I am very happy because these days there is an increase of farmers who take farming as a business,” CEDA Francistown branch manager Mr Motsumi Yane said when giving a keynote address at the Tonota West Farmers Day recently.

He encouraged farmers to further take advantage of programmes such as ISPAAD and LIMID, which government had established with the intention to assist Batswana to develop the agricultural sector.

Mr Yane said the aims of such programmes were to improve on household and national food security at the same time eradicating poverty as the agricultural sector has the potential to create employment.

Due to challenges of Botswana being food insecure, he said farmers were encouraged to diversify farming, looking at the rainfall patterns due to climate variations and change.

He said that in simple terms, farm diversification could refer to the addition of new produce or farming systems to agricultural production on a farm or re-allocation of some farm’s productive resources such as land, capital, farm equipment and labour to other products and even to non- farming activities such as agro-tourism.

Mr Yane emphasised that farm diversification could be facilitated by technological break through, by changes in consumer demand, in government policy or in trade arrangements and by the development of irrigation, roads and other infrastructures.

He, however, said that research in the Sub-Saharan Africa had indicated that crop diversification provided smallholder farmers with a diversity of diet, improved their income and nutrition security.

On the other hand, he said a more diverse farming system could contribute to household food security. He, however, said the relationship was influenced by other factors such as the market orientation of a household, livestock ownership, non-agricultural employment opportunities and availability of land resources.

“Farmers in Africa have long adapted to climatic and other risks by diversifying their farming activities,” he said, emphasising that crop diversification was an effective strategy to deal with climate variability.

Mr Yane said that in terms of the policy, the results implied that the current efforts by the government to intensify the promotion of crop diversification should remain a priority policy due to the continued malnutrition and food insecurity threats.

He said another contributing factor to low crop productivity of the arable sub-sector was that some farmers were not committed and always shifted blame for their failure on natural disasters.ENDS