The demise of beef industry: A farmer’s perspective
Let me declare from the onset that I was born during the Bechuanaland era and during that time able bodied Batswana were either teachers, nurses, vet assistants or tribal officers. These formed a very small fraction of the society across various ethnical groups and these were the educated few. The next were the miners made of illiterate men turning into manhood who had to go through the ritual to become husbands, they had to learn how to handle money and provide for a woman and that curriculum was only available at the mines in South Africa, the rest of the populace was made up of farmers who had mastered the art of feeding themselves through the agricultural industry that stood and maintained Bechuanaland in the global map through thick and thin. Droughts came and passed, world wars came and passed, Difecane of southern Africa had its share and so did health pandemics, one thing remained constant, these men and women hardened their zeal to feed themselves at all costs both at individual level and as collectives. I beg to be allowed to conclude that it was this determination of self- feed that motivated the white settlers to come also and venture into cattle rearing in Bechuanaland which ended with them acquiring prime pastoral land. One may go a step further and opine that it is the same dedication that encouraged the settlers to establish the BMC precursor known as CDC having assessed the sustainability of the cattle industry and its prosperity.
During the Bechuanaland era, all means of production were controlled by the chiefs for the good of the society through appropriate management systems to ensure efficiency and efficacy. Land was mapped up to afford various needs of the society and thus pastoral land was availed for cattle breeding. All these were meticulously executed without pen and paper but through established structures which used folks’ knowledge as institutional memories from generation to generation. When I was growing up I found my parents were rearing cattle in the Ngwato area of Tshwaane cattle post around the current Sowa mine. Grazing land was clustered along Ngwato ward structure with ours being Maaloso, then followed by Manyadiwa and Dinokwane cattle posts where each cluster basically had both grazing and water rights under its management. Each cluster had to determine its own seasonal ( rotational) grazing system so that cattle had adequate perennial pasture to maintain good body condition which is a prerequisite for cattle multiplication and marketing needs. Of course occasionally like elsewhere disaster would be disruptive but normalcy would follow later. This is how the beef industry was performing during those days and this is what made it to contribute around 40 percent of GDP during infancy of Botswana amongst other factors. During those days cattle by- products were collected and preprocessed before export, the same thing applied to dry bones. I remember as a young boy in Serowe one would collect bones from the village and exchange them for sweets or two heaped table spoons of “serobe” at the local general dealer which were then called “Otela’ from the borrowed name hotel. At moraka my mother used to produce two 15- litres cans of raw cream for sale in Francistown Creamery which would later be collected and sent to either
South Africa or the then Rhodesia. All that said in the foregoing was to demonstrate 1) the potentiality of the beef industry during Bechuanaland era; 2) the farming management systems that sustained the cattle population during the Bechuanaland era; 3) the entrepreneurial spirit of Batswana at that time as indicated by bye- products and the networking/ collaboration along the value chain. All these were driven by the zeal of Self- Reliance, the confidence to believe in one’s self and the courage to alienate from self- degradation ( inferiority complex). In fact one is inclined to believe that these factors galvanised the desert- men to seek self- rule from Mmamosadinyane albeit poor developmental status by global ratings. These men believed that with determination of their agrarian human capital, the market appetite for their farm products, massive land and wildlife, there is a strong case for them to get the baton and run the race for self- rule. At that time cattle were a source of hard cash which was used for education and those who were educated were proving to be assets and requisite tools for self- rule. This is how cattle has been pivotal to the development of the present Botswana and our cattle ( carcass quality) have over years maintained their competitiveness in global markets, sadly and very strangely the same industry is organisationally on its knees and currently it’s a national liability while the appetite for our beef is globally rising. What went wrong and can there be correction to return the industry to its days of glory? I believe yes the industry can be resuscitated onto a new path of recovery as I shall opine below:
CATTLE POPULATION
It has been argued that our cattle population has gone down since the mid- 1980s from a prospective 3 million to the current estimate of 1.2 million though this numbers is a gross approximation given the erratic counting system caused by many factors such as stray animals, inaccessible farms, time constraints and arrivals of cattle at farms. It has been submitted that the low throughput at the national abattoirs of Francistown and Lobatse is due to low offtake from farms and hence the ultimate closure of the Francistown abattoirs and the dwindling animals into the Lobatse abattoir which currently struggle below 50 percent slaughter rate. Some research work has been carried out in the 80s pointing out at immanency of these trends and we read that some attempts were made by government to multiply the production of cattle but this has failed to fruition, such attempts include introduction of fast- track breed like Brahmans which later proved to be problematic with traditional farmers as it is less tameable than other breed. Regardless of the intervention that government attempted, still the cattle numbers went down and one may ask why.
FANIMAL BODY CONDITIONING
or a farmer to produce livestock, condition of an animal is the most important aspect of his operations and he can achieve this by either zerograzing where he will determine how much animals will feed per day for particular objective, alternatively he will have to free ranch animals where he will have to manage the grazing area for the same objective as in zerograzing, this is only possible where the farmer will have total control to manage the grazing land and this means ownership of such land. The other option is to let livestock find its survival mode by grazing in open area where there is no right or wrong, typical of post- independence communal grazing where there is no control to achieve the objectives sought at both zero- grazing and ranching yet expectations are seemingly the same. The reality is that as long as a farmer has no control over the grazing area there is no how he can determine the body condition of his livestock unless he undertakes heavy supplementation. This is why during Bechuanaland, farmers in communal lands had both water rights and grazing rights so that they could manage conditions of their livestock effectively and in most cases this was through rotational grazing using different ( dithota) areas for each season as a rancher would with seasonal paddocking. Livestock with year round healthy conditions have high multiplication factor due to high calving rate, high fertility rate and low mortality rate, provided all things remain equal bulls also have a high libido surge.
Currently it’s reported that about 80 percent of Botswana cattle are in communal area where animal body conditioning is highly compromised due to reasons advanced above. The negative seasonality factor dominant in communal areas has exacerbated the impairment on the national BMC efficiency rating where during dry season the same number of offtake from communal area does not offer the same carcass yield as in green season. Thus the criticality of body conditioning is not only vital for cattle production but also for commercial and business gains.
PRODUCTION LAND
For whatever gainful use, land has been defined as one of the means of production in the macro- economic perspective. This narrative compels us to accept without exceptions that whatever we assign land use for, it must be with prudency, proficiency, diligence, utmost optimisation and futuristic foresight. It should be emphasised that this being the case land is a key fundamental natural resource that should be treated as a principal primary public asset whose use must yield public good. Where land has been identified as a means of production it would make sense for government to invest massive interest in such ventures so that the nation benefits from such land use and not relegate sovereign responsibility to individual citizen who may fail to optimise the land use and thus deprive the nation from benefits of such a key resource as individuals cannot account for national famine when food security has failed the nation. For the state to ensure food security, the state must ensure that land allocated for agriculture is protected as such and there is a deliberate policy that determines minimum output from the same otherwise leaving everything to individual under the guise of free economy is a recipe for a national suicide especially in third world countries where the level of agro- economics entrepreneurship is wanting. We have seen the dare consequences somewhere in Africa where production land changed hands not for prudency but for other interests. It is thus important that we as a nation and particularly government avail its mind to understand the value of land, the potential it carries and how meticulously it should fend for the nation from generations to generations.
Currently our land tenure system is either freehold, tribal or state- land and most of our cattle per capita are in tribal land which is controlled by Land Boards who lease land for various uses. Unfortunately while they have control over a large chunk of agricultural land which includes farming, their mandate carries no role in the optimisation and efficacy of beef land as seen in communal land where they only allocate water source to cattle owners but not production land. As far as their mandate is concerned in communal areas, they do not allocate land for cattle production, they don’t even have structures in place to ensure that the land they designated for cattle rearing actually achieves that. This is in contrast to the Bechuanaland which ensured that cattle land was identified and controlled for that purpose only. Currently anyone can settle in the meraka and there is nothing wayward with that as “anybody is free to settle wherever they so feel”. This is the reason advanced by squatters when confronted by farmers. I will submit that if we are serious with the beef industry and have identified animal production as one key factor contributing to our industry demise, it makes sense that we retool our production methods and key to that being the land where we want to produce cattle. Paramount is whether as a country do we have policies that define ranches and cattle posts as production areas and if such policies exist, how such areas are protected from misuse, abuse, under use and unnecessary bureaucratic disruptions without due diligence; how such policies if any facilitate ways to enhance objectives of production areas to sustain the national head. Looking at the current scenario on the ground, one can only shed too much doubts as it’s free for all in tribal jurisdictions. Even in ranches, there is no functioning instruments to ensure that ranches are purpose- use as one can be allocated a ranch today only to sell it within a short time having literally done no production on the ranch, in fact some people acquire ranches not for production but merely for a ranch to be an asset which they can dispose at the glance of a bulky wallet. Disappointingly it appears there is no single- mindedness between the ministry of food security and the ministry of land use to ensure that cattle land is optimised for national head, I must admit that the scenario is different from the crop land and that’s for the obvious reason, ( there is total ownership of land use in crop production hence something to write home about). Until such time that we as a nation we put in place systems that ensure that agricultural land is managed for purpose- fit, our national cattle head will continuously down trend because currently we are mismatching land use with cattle production.
One way to ensure recovery of our national head is to come up with a robust grazing transformation agenda that will ensure that every square metre tendered for cattle production is under a farmer’s control so that such a farmer can match his head to grassland under his care. This can be done by downsizing the communal land which currently takes 80 percent of the head and we all know in terms of BMC performance, this 80 percent only yields 20 percent BMC slaughter efficiency while ranches which hold 20 percent of cattle yield 80 percent of BMC slaughter efficiency. These figures depict payoffs of controlled production areas in ranches when well managed but the same cannot be said of communal grazing. In fact I once had a talk with one of my colleagues whereas my colleague did not speak well of ranches which are dilapidated but supported communal grazing for small farmers, in the discussion I questioned what will happen if in crops, we have communal cropping where say five farmers have to plough in one hectare that is not demarcated and ploughing was by broadcasting because the land belong to all and no one is allowed to plant in rows as that would be akin to owning land whereas its communal land. This will be chaotic as it’s impossible to tell which farmer owns which crops in the said hectares, in fact it’s a nonstarter.