Thupeyo Muleya, Beitbridge Bureau
GOVERNMENT and its partners have embarked on a joint stockfeed production project targeting Beitbridge farmers in a move set to alleviate perennial feed shortages.

The project is being implemented under the Zimbabwe Resilience Building fund with the Department of Agriculture Extension Services (Agritex) providing technical services while the Progress Consortium is the implementing partner.

The district’s Agritex officer, Mr Masauso Mawocha, said the project started last Friday and they have so far procured 11 mobile stockfeed hammer mills for livestock fodder production and five stockfeed mixers.

He said their target was to train at least 80 farmers in each of the 15 rural wards who would then pass the knowledge to1 020 others.

“The objective is to mitigate perennial livestock feed shortages through having at least 20 people who can formulate basic cattle maintenance feeds from cheap locally available resources,” said Mr Mawocha.

He said this will help reduce cattle deaths due to hunger, improve productivity in general and reduce the amount of labour required for mass production of local livestock fodder.

“In addition, we are hopeful that such an initiative will also contribute to the production of quality stockfeed,” said Mr Mawocha.

He said his team had started handing over the equipment to selected ward leadership and committees responsible for its upkeep in line with the obtaining Covid-19 management protocols.

Mr Mawocha said they were training farmers on how to operate and service the machinery.

The development comes a few months after the Government successfully implemented an artificial insemination programme under the ZRBF, which benefited more than 500 smallholder farmers in the district.

Under this three-year programme, artificial insemination was done on a total of 1 200 animals with more than 80 percent calving rate.

The programme’s main focus is to promote resilience through introducing bloodlines from beef breeds that are hard in terms of diseases and nutritional needs. These include Tuli, Boran, Brahman and a few jersey breeds (dairy animals) for farmers with access to irrigated fodder.

During the 2019/20 cropping season, Matabeleland South lost 16 853 cattle due to hunger with Beitbridge recording the highest of 4 413 deaths followed by Matobo, which had 2993.

Bulilima had 2 697 deaths, Gwanda (2569), Insiza (2357), Mangwe(1434) and Umzingwane (390). — @tupeyo.