OCTOBER and November are usually two of the busiest months for everyone in farming industry. This is the time during which, as a farmer, you either make or break it in terms of giving your season a good start.
This is normally the time when every stakeholder in the agriculture industry should be busy making sure they effectively play their part in oiling the agricultural juggernaut that is about to take off.
Of course preparations for a new season should naturally start at the conclusion of its predecessor, so the current hive of activities must be marking the climax of the preparatory works. This may also be the month to kick the tyres on your new tractor and find some good tools as well. It is also a time to learn something new about the season whose threshold you stand on guided by many other factors such as the weather forecast (mostly for dry land farmers) and the availability of key enablers like inputs and sometimes funding.
For funding you should have done your out-sourcing way before the start of the season so that you can use the funds for the preparations.
We understand land preparations and the distribution of inputs especially under the Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme currently mark the order of the day, which is a good sign because the rains look set to fall on any day. These prevailing hot temperatures may be heralding the coming of the rains any time soon hence the need for you to be ready.
You need to make sure those planting stations are ready and if you are doing conventional land tillage, then your land should also have been ploughed and waiting to receive seed with the first effective rains.
There is, however, some concern over the way some of you have been handling the inputs coming under the Government’s support programmes. Those inputs are meant to give you a head start to the season while the Pfumvudza/Intwasa concept should be there to climate-proof your operations.
They are not for sale or bragging purposes. The inputs must be put to good use so that at the end of the season you realise yields that allow you to deliver something to the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and still retain some for domestic purposes. It is folly for you to divert those inputs to other purposes when they are intended to contribute towards boosting production en route to both national and household food security.
Wishing you the best, as you go about your preparations!
