The demise of beef industry: A farmer’s perspective

This is the reality with communal grazing farming. It’s just impossible for an individual farmer to control what his livestock is feeding on and hence rendering the system outdated and unhelpful in this era. While the argument advanced is that cattle is important to an average Motswana, times dictate that this must be done in sync with modern times so that farming remains productive and sustainable. I believe the best way is to parcel communal land into different segments where farms will be sized according to cattle production. There are many wins to be gained by doing away with communal grazing such as:

1) According every farmer full control of production land for his animal avails him an opportunity to make necessary improved grazing patterns on the farm to maximise livestock production both in quality and quantity as disease control will be made easy to reduce mortality and good pasture will improve fertility thus high calving rate. This ownership also gives such land economic value as with ranches which is currently a monopoly by those with ranches. Segmenting communal land into small ranches will give every livestock owner economic muscles as it is proposed with residential plots in tribal land. This is equity, we can’t have an entity called a farmer where one farmer owns land as a means of animal production and the other farmer does not own land as it’s deemed communal but he is also expected to achieve the same and then during a tea break seminar at GICC, blame both farmers for the demise of BMC.

2) Since every cattle post will be fenced, this will eliminate stray cattle along our roads thus reduce accidents and this will eliminate the Matimela issue as it will be easy to trace which cattle strayed from which farm. Motor vehicle companies will benefit from this as accidents claims will reduce and Councils will also be spared Matimela expenses. National disease outbreaks will be easier to manage as livestock will be readily kraaled in for vaccination campaigns, this will also improve on livestock censors.

3) Once fenced predators will have difficulty in surviving in farmlands as there will be too many fences to navigate through and contact with farmers will be increased thus farmland will become too hostile for survival to most predators including cattle thieves who will now be working on a much tighter space. This will become handy for our Wildlife department as their areas of coverage will be confined to wildland where their budget will be effective, currently they are under stress to budget for farmers compensation which in 2017/ 18 was somewhere around P50 million and this keeps going up every year. This money could be used for both opex and capex of the department which are currently stifled.

4) Fencing communal farms creates automatic clustering which both farmers and government are currently battling with. Clustered formations easily identify common issues and facilitations are easy unlike the current set up in communal areas where it is difficult to get farmers together. It will be spatially convenient to carry cluster developments in fenced areas. These are some of the obvious benefits of fenced farming.

5) There are diverse means of watering livestock in communal land where farmers use, watering points such as rivers, pans and dams where farmers have to herd their animals to the source. Once farms are fenced, livestock will be herded to watering points through corridors or access roads and then driven back to respective farms, this also mitigates indiscriminate soil erosion created by many tracks heading to watering points in the current system. In areas where there are no natural water sources, an opportunity arises for some borehole owners to reticulate water for the neighbouring farms who will pay on monthly basis. This becomes an economic activity for those with boreholes but not keeping livestock anymore. This will afford every farmer to have water in his farm instead of herding for long distance to rented boreholes.

It is high time that Batswana take the issue of transformation seriously as we cannot afford to talk transformation while at the same time we have religious comfort in our old systems that do not take us nowhere. Modern times dictate our way of life and this requires robust and aggressive decisions to be taken if we are to survive in this century. It makes no sense for government to subsidise farmers heavily only to let them practise religious farming which fails to develop them into self- sustaining farmers, this drains the national purse resulting in everybody being asked to pay tax that drains into subsidies. Countries whose progress we so persistently cherish had to take bold steps to transform but it appears our transformation only ends with just chronic consultancy, endless benchmarking and perennial reviews. Ours is to persistently review unimplemented policies and transform unimplemented strategies for umpteenth times.

PRODUCTION LAND OWNERSHIP

It is being said many times in different forums that one of the problems with the beef industry is that a good number of Batswana are month- end or week- end farmers who are therefore not on full time basis thus compromising the performance of their entities. This narrative is theorised on the assumption that for an entity to thrive, the owner who by extension is the shareholder should physically be on the ground at all times. I am sure we all know that owners of multinationals are mostly old folks who can’t even bother to leave the comfort of their homes simply because they have to be at their business sites. These people simply run their businesses through best practise systems. Therefore the notion of absent farmers remains a perception. Empirical evidence to this effect has not been availed yet and therefore this narrative remains a perception because there are some people who had been at work for a good part of their life while at the same time running a farming entity to quite some degree of success and once they retire from formal employment, the same have sustained their farming and these may only constitute a small number of successful month- end farmers. The irony of month end farmers in this country is that most of them are senior people both in government and in the private sector and most of them own prime area in beef industry and unfortunately these are the same people who loudly bad mouth week- end farming at the earliest opportunity whenever given a public platform. These are the people who are keeping production land that could be availed to fulltime cattle producers who need it most including upcoming ones like young farmers who would then improve on livestock numbers to sustain the beef industry.

I must admit that this article could not exhaust all attributes of declining cattle numbers as there are other hosts of factors which compromise the conductivity of beef farming amongst these are poor or lack of infrastructure, lack of communication, and one can say with some degree of certainty that in Botswana the environment for farming is far from being conducive, human wildlife is a case in point where farmers are expected to farm in the mist of destructive and dangerous elephants as well as most predators hoping by luck they could still meet their obligation of feeding not only themselves but the entire nation and even hope of exporting. This is both fallacious and mythical, farmers need the same conducive treatment that is accorded to foreign investors if those in control are serious about transforming the economy including agriculture. We can’t have a minister telling Maitengwe people that government will remove elephants from their farms and in the afternoon of the same day, the same minister tells Nkange people that they have to learn to live with elephants. What sense does one make out of that, Batswana will never be self- sufficient for government is willingly making some Batswana farm wastefull knowing that they will be compensated through various tax regimes.

Whenever minerals are found in these communities, they are easily removed by way of palsy compensations while the area loses its potential to produce food ( no wonder why there is reluctance on the part of government to develop these areas into fully fledged agric production areas). This state of affairs has resulted in communal areas easily being converted into mining pits thus depriving citizens for food sufficiency which could mitigate import bills and social safe netting that would have been avoided had there been a clear policy on cattle production areas.

It is only through a robust aggressive transformative agenda and political will that we can make food security a success, otherwise our cattle numbers will fail to grow.