By Kudakwashe Pembere
In its bid to improve the livestock sector at a time the El Nino induced drought claimed about 10 000 cattle, the Zimbabwean Government is seized with improving the feed and fodder sector having a cocktail of measures such as the Presidential Silage scheme and the Presidential legume pasture program (creation of fodder banks) to mention but these.
This was said by Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development Deputy Minister Dr Davis Marapira during Resilient Feed and Fodder Systems (RAFFS) workshop in Harare. The RAFFS is an initiative where the Africa Union InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR)supporting six African countries namely Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda and Somalia to improve food and nutrition security through robust feed and fodder programs.
“In an effort to address these challenges, the government produced the Livestock Growth Plan, a blue print with strategies to improve livestock production and productivity. One of the pillars addressed in the growth plan is Livestock Nutrition.
“To address nutrition issue affecting livestock industry, the government has introduced various measures which include the Presidential silage scheme, the Presidential legume pasture program involving the creation of fodder banks, the Presidential borehole drilling program to mitigate water shortage and improve access to livestock watering and irrigation water, the Construction of water troughs at functional borehole,” he said.
He added, “Government supported hay baling program where hay is baled in high rainfall areas, and transported to low rainfall needy areas to minimise hunger related deaths in livestock.”
Dr Marapira added that as a Ministry they are promoting more research and development to develop AU-IBAR pastures given to us by God. But we can improve through innovation and research. Coming up with modernized grasses. You hear the President talking about modernization. That’s where we go talk about modernization.
“You modernize our pastures so that we come up with a grass which will provide a good crude protein content. And if you have good protein content, automatically what it means, our animals will grow. Not only growing in healthy but will expand in numbers because they can only conceive if they have at least about 75% of their body weight. So that is a very good intervention” he said.
Speaking on behalf of the AU-IBAR Director Huyam Salih, the organization’s team lead for the RAFFS project Dr Sarah Ashanut Ossiya said while most of the attention is given to the depreciation of the national herd, it was important to pay attention to the feed and fodder sector which contributes about 70 percent in the cost of production. She said countries should also develop feed and fodder sector inventories which may help them in coming up with response mechanisms to address and minimise deaths of cattle on the back of climate change related issues.
“But we say we now need to shift this to feed and fodder sector. So we have countries which had feed inventories that showed they had 70% deficit in feed and fodder. That means that they were only able to, at that point, feed three out of ten animals. But they never raised an alert. So they wait until the animals start to die, until animals have lost body condition.
“And in fact, what we have found is that for one of those countries, the numbers of animals that have died in the East African region, the last drought, we had 10.5 million animals that died. That is between 2020 and 2023. 10.5 million livestock died. But the biggest loss was actually body condition. So what we discovered, animals lose 60% of their body condition and that is a big loss in countries,” she said.
