Matabeleland South has always been the hardest hit by droughts across the country almost every year.

GWANDA — The drought-prone province of Matabeleland South, which has depended largely on ranching for many years, should embark on both crops and livestock production, a provincial agronomist has advised.
Innocent Nyathi said it was “weird thinking” to suggest that the province should not cultivate crops because crops fail every year and that cattle fare better in the region.
Matabeleland South has always been the hardest hit by droughts across the country almost every year.
There have been suggestions from agricultural stakeholders that the arid province, previously known as the Brazil of Zimbabwe because of its good cattle ranching, should focus on livestock while leaving crop production to other provinces.
“I always say that is weird thinking, where people always think Matabeleland South is a livestock region,” Nyathi told the Financial Gazette’s Companies & Markets on the side-lines of the 58th edition of the Matabeleland South Agricultural Show held in the provincial capital of Gwanda recently.
“Yes it is a livestock region like any other province. If I can go back to statistics, Matabeleland South used to have a higher livestock number compared to Masvingo, for example, but Masvingo now has a higher livestock number compared to Matabeleland South,” he said.
The provincial agronomist said even if the province was to focus on massive cattle production, grazing land would be a problem with some farms having been turned into resettlement areas under the land reform programme.
“We have taken much of the land and resettled people,” Nyathi explained.
“That has also some consequences because remember we are also saying, the land that is meant for grazing is now residential land, it is also land for cropping. In as much as we would want or dream of improving our livestock numbers, that is a non-starter,” he said.
Livestock and crop farming should complement each other, said Nyathi.
“It should be a 50-50 situation — do cropping, do livestock; there is no harm on that,” said Nyathi.
The food situation in some parts of the province is however becoming dire owing to the poor harvest in the 2014-2015 cropping season.
“I would say we are battling in terms of meeting our food requirements but the issue really is not about not having enough stock but the issue of distribution,” Nyathi elaborated.
“You would discover there are districts like Insiza which have enough food. If you go to Umzingwane there is enough from last season and even Bulilima and parts of Gwanda but the issue of distribution is the only challenge.”
He said should the problem of distribution be addressed, the drought could be dealt with too.
“I am not really shooting the issue of other families starving. We have some other families who are really starving; we need to also look into that,” added Nyathi.
As part of preparations for the next cropping season, Nyathi said they had submitted to government their input requirements.
“What normally happens is, we first of all take stock of our requirements in terms of household numbers and try and triangulate that and see whether we are able to balance up with the tonnage that we require vis a vis the population, which is the household numbers,” said the agronomist.
“I think we have developed that; that has gone up. The national office is also looking into the issue… so that they might be able to find resources to push up the inputs.”
He bemoaned poor input allocation every year, arguing it was also contributing to low yields.
“We have never been satisfied as we normally get half of the inputs for our allocation,” he said.
“This is really a cause for concern. Why are we not getting our full allocation as it were? That one is a cause of worry surely. I know that this year even if we have our allocation we won’t meet what is expected.”
An irrigation technician, Claudious Shuro, said Matabeleland South had the potential of doing better in crops should irrigation schemes scattered across the province be fully utilised.
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