Really good rainy seasons like the one we have been enjoying have never been that common and global warming probably means they become rarer, with El Ninos being regrettably becoming more common than La Ninas and even in normal years the rainfall being less regular with wet spells interspersed with longer dry spells.

Even in the best years, there has been a trend for later starts to the season. While 50 years ago Zimbabwe was often fairly well-drenched in early November, allowing early planting, most farmers now have to wait a bit, sometimes right up to December, before planting, and that is in the good years.

This means more irrigation, a lot more irrigation. Winter crops have always needed full irrigation and the sugar fields in the Lowveld have been almost totally dependent on that complex of large dams built in the Sabi-Runde catchment over the decades.

But even in the days of the big commercial farming estates the minority of good commercial farmers invested in farm dams and boreholes and used supplementary irrigation to start crops and to carry them through the dry periods in the summer season.

This now has to become the new normal, for all farmers. The settler regimes did invest quite a bit into dam construction for the commercial area, where their white voters farmed, and allowed these same commercial farmers to build their own smaller dams, funded with major tax breaks in good seasons, and thus taking up the bulk of the water rights.

The First Republic continued major dam building into the 1980s, but then sat back on much required investment. Land reform did open up some irrigation potential for the majority, but without much being added.

Now the Second Republic, as one of the priorities on its catch-up list, has been busy investing. This year sees more than $10 billion assigned to dams. Already the Tugwi-Mukosi Dam, impounding the largest interior reservoir in Zimbabwe and anchoring the irrigation complex in the Lowveld, was finished rapidly after sitting there for years half-complete. It even filled this season.

Causeway Dam on the Manicaland-Mashonaland East border was also finished just in time for the present season, and is thus filling. Three major dams are to be commissioned this year, including the giant Gwayi-Shangani Dam that will not just sort out the perennial water shortages for Bulawayo but allow some serious irrigation farming in Matabeleland North, with other dams also being commissioned in Matabeleland.

It takes a couple of years to build a big dam, but a lot of concrete is being poured in our dry seasons.

But even more important there is now a new national policy, set by President Mnangagwa, that communal lands are to be included in the large irrigation schemes.

Communal farmers cannot remain subsistence farmers on arid small farms if they are to become “middle income” with the rest of us over the next decade and Zimbabwe will not be a middle income country if more than a third of its land and people are left out of the development.

Already a large communal irrigation scheme has been commissioned at Kanyemba, one of the most neglected parts of Zimbabwe in the past, and that is just the start of a huge planned greenbelt stretching across northern Zimbabwe, converting some of the poorest Zimbabweans into middle income farmers, along with the new jobs being created in the processing factories and the support industries a quality farming area automatically generates.

Now the Lowveld, home to some of the best soils in Zimbabwe and many of its larger dams, including the two biggest, is being tackled with a planned addition of 200 000 hectares of irrigation much of it in the communal areas.

These sort of investments require more than just what the taxpayers can shell out, so the private sector has been told it is welcome to participate, invest, and make profits, but there are conditions.

First no one is to be pushed off their land, although minor reorganisation of homesteads will be needed to clear the paths for canals and pipelines, and everyone needs to agree on the contracts.

And the Government will be refereeing the deals cut between investors and communal communities to ensure fairness to both parties. But, to a large degree, this is already established.

Our tobacco industry is now built on smallholders, and the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board has developed enviable expertise in its active oversight, licensing the private investors, the tobacco merchants, and licensing the farmers, to ensure they physically exist and have land.

The board also oversees the research, and checks out the standard contracts to ensure that they are fair to both parties and are enforced. In fact that model has now been largely adopted by Government in its huge input schemes centred on the Grain Marketing Board.

What can be thought of as the pilot scheme for large-scale irrigation in Lowveld communal lands is now coming up for implementation, a private investment of an eventual US$60 million in Chilonga along the banks of Runde River.

The investor, a major dairy company, wants a large, continuous and guaranteed supply of high-quality high-value bulk organic stockfeed, with a modest surplus that can be exported for hard currency.

The farmers want a decent continuous income. So a deal has been negotiated, with the Government, traditional leaders and the local council reading the fine print and ensuring mutual fairness.

As this sort of scheme could well be a model for other crops in other areas, it would be a good idea to get it right.

It should be noted that even if plans do not work out, no one suffers. The farmers are not being displaced, so they will still have the infrastructure in place and can sign contracts with another investor proving inputs for other crops, and the investor could always get most of its money back by selling its assets to that other investor. Since no one is displaced, problems self correct.

These deals between private investors and smallholder farmers are not uncommon. Take the myriad of small farmers on the chalky soils of the Champagne region of France. The huge companies that produce, mature and market the sparkling wines do not grow many grapes.

The farming communities in the area have the supply deals; they agree what varieties and quantities to grow, have a guaranteed market and have sorted out the pricing by acting together, and French farmers are notorious for extracting every possible euro. Everybody gets rich.

Anyone assuming that Zimbabwe’s communal farmers are ill-educated traditionalists is making a mistake. Like everyone else they want to use their assets and their labour to make as much money as possible and are quite happy to look at innovation and deals.

All the Government needs to do is provide the oversight, provide the referee when inevitable disputes arise, ensure everyone, investor and farmers, shares fairly in success and ensure no one is permanently damaged if something goes wrong.

The investor-friendly and people-friendly combined model now being developed does just that.