By Elton Ziki
IN the foreword to the National Development Strategy1 (NDS1) document, President Emmerson Mnangagwa states that the blueprint is premised on four critical guiding principles.
The first is: “…recognition that bold and transformative measures are required to underpin the drive towards the attainment of our 2030 National Vision. Slow and incremental change will not deliver the transformation that the people of Zimbabwe deserve.”
The NDS1, 2021-2025 is the successor to the Transitional Stabilisation Plan (TSP) and is the first five-year Medium-Term Plan aimed at realising the country’s Vision by the Second Republic.
It is the bold and transformative measures in production and productivity in key locomotive or anchor sectors in agriculture, mining, manufacturing and tourism that will be critical in achieving the overall goal of sustainable economic growth. Agriculture is heavily tied to other industries, goods and services, such as equipment manufacturers, feed suppliers, transportation, food retailers and restaurants, among others in the economy, hence its efficient productivity is key to attaining Vision 2030.
Efforts to utilise agricultural mechanisation to supplement human muscle for increased agricultural production is essential.
The development of agricultural mechanisation can be traced back to early civilisation to the stick and stone tools used by farmers in pre-historic times.
Recorded history shows drawings made as early as 6 000 BC in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia show a Y-shaped stick used in a manner similar to a hoe or mattock to prepare the land for seed. Later drawings show that one branch of the stick was left longer to form a beam by which the implement could be pulled through the soil by slaves or animals, man had developed the first plough. However, hand-tool technology was all that was available for agricultural production in these early periods.
In about 3 000 BC, man learned to harness the animals he had domesticated earlier and the era of animal-draught technology in agriculture commenced.
At about the same time, the wheel was invented or discovered and the never-ending series of handling and carrying operations that characterise agricultural production was made easier and more efficient with two-wheel carts pulled by human or animal power.
There were other developments in these early years.
Some type of mechanical planting device is reported to have existed in China in 2 300 BC.
Pictures on an Egyptian tomb, built some 1 400 or 1 500 years BC, show grain being cut with sickles and carried away to be threshed by tramping oxen.
Wetland rice, grown on flooded and terraced fields, was known in China in 1 000 BC giving evidence of a significant level of engineering knowledge.
A simple harrow, consisting a thorny bush weighted with a log, was used to smooth the seedbed in many regions.
Grain was threshed either by driving cattle over it or by beating it with a jointed stick called a flail.
It was winnowed by tossing it in the air where wind separated chaff from grain.
Agricultural mechanisation development can be traced to the introduction of animal power in 3 000 BC.
Throughout the first 7 000 or 8 000 years of recorded history, farm tools and implements resulted mainly from innovative efforts of farmers alone while designing and manufacturing took place on the farm, based on materials readily available.
The fundamental tools of early farming were the plough and the sickle and, except for minor refinements in design and the addition of metal for the cutting edges, ploughs remained the same, save for little changes over the centuries.
Steam engines were adopted as a stationary power source for threshers, mills, pumps and cable ploughs.
Finally, a ‘steam traction engine’ was developed to provide mobile power for the heavy tillage operations on large-scale farms.
But, in the part of the world that was untouched by this industrial revolution, humans and animals continued to provide the only power available to farmers.
Ploughs, other farm tools and implements were virtually unchanged from the simple design that had been in use for thousands of years.
The pressures for increased agricultural production were not so great in most of Africa, Asia and Latin America during the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th and 19th Century.
Population, in the aforementioned regions, was not moving off the farms into industry as the bulk of the population that was engaged in agriculture could continue to farm as they had for centuries with hand tools and simple implements powered by humans and animals to meet their demands for food.
In the Zimbabwean context, output from agriculture has to be increased to feed the growing population, therefore, mechanisation must quickly be embraced in a holistic approach going forward.
To meet increased demand for nutritious food with less labour to grow it, farmers must turn to scientific practices of soil management, fertiliser use and improved seed varieties and moreso, mechanical aids to increase labour productivity and cultivation of virgin forests and large tracts of heavy clay fields abundant in Zimbabwe.
Draught animal numbers must be increased to meet demand for power on the farms and animal draught equipment should be improved and made accessible to farmers as we embrace farm mechanisation in the country for increased agricultural output.
Shortly after the turn of the 20th Century, the adaption of the internal combustion engine to tractors and advances in refining of liquid fossil fuels provided the new source of farm power the industrialised countries had been waiting for.
In the early years, tractors were huge and clumsy machines of 22-45 horsepower, weighing up to 20 tonnes, with four iron wheels, the rear pair cleated for traction.
But, by 1917, designs were completed for the first mass produced tractor which was lighter and more efficient.
The following year saw the introduction of the built-in power-take-off (p.t.o.) and the tractor’s engine could be used to operate the moving parts of machines such as binders, combines, mowers, corn pickers, chemical and fertiliser sprayers as they moved through the field.