IN order to address the challenge of mobilising huge amounts of foreign exchange to import soya bean and soya products such as cooking oil and soya meal for stock feeds manufacture, the Government of Zimbabwe has committed to local production under the Command Agriculture model.
A target of 60 000 hectares is planned.
For this large area to be planted, many farmers who have little or no experience with soya bean will have to be brought on board.
The new recruits to soya bean production will require intense coaching in the form of basic training in soya crop production. No effort should be spared to provide adequate training and technical advisory support.
But more of that later.
In this series of articles, we shall review the introduction of soya to black small-scale farmers, the challenges encountered and the lessons learnt in previous initiatives.
In the process, we shall also provide information on how to grow soya bean under the different conditions found in different parts of Zimbabwe.
It is hoped that this information will be a useful introduction to soya production for the thousands of farmers who hope to take up the crop starting in the 2017/18 cropping season.
The series of articles will not only inform farmers, but policy-makers and other technocrats involved in the soya bean value chains.
The overall aim is to demystify soya bean production and facilitate its main streaming at small, medium and large scales of production, processing and marketing by indigenous black Zimbabweans.
While the articles will be as informative as possible, they will avoid too much technical jargon to allow most people to follow the soya bean story.
In this and subsequent articles, we shall try to follow the story of soya bean production among black farmers in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe.
In the process we expect the crop’s strategic importance in our economy to become evident. When I returned from my postgraduate studies in the US where I learnt many good things about the importance of soya bean to health, nutrition and the economy, I was keen to promote the crop among black farmers.
My Major professor had told me in a lecture that soya bean produces the largest quantity of protein per unit area of land compared to all other natural systems available then.
I was impressed.
I decided to do my thesis research on soya bean, especially the rhizobium soil bacteria that forms nodules on soya bean roots and fixes the equivalent of up to 200 kg ammonium nitrate per hectare, thereby saving the farmers huge sums of money.
That set me on my soyabean ‘crusade’.
At that time (1988), thanks to the Lancaster House Constitution provisions, all the white farmers were still comfortably settled on their farms despite the African takeover of Government at independence in 1980.
They were growing soya bean and making money!
The Africans, despite having fought valiantly and defeated the white settlers in battle, continued to languish in the African reserves which were now politely referred to as ‘communal lands’.
The white farmers grew soya bean in rotation with wheat where irrigation was in place or with maize in dry land cropping.
The majority of Africans did not even know of the existence of soya bean as a crop, let alone its multiple benefits.
Soya bean was largely unknown among communal farmers except by those Africans who worked on white farms where the crop was grown.
One journalist once wrote that Mpepereki (the author) had grown up on a white farm and had been introduced to soya bean there.
That was wild speculation; I never lived on a farm as I grew up.
I first saw a soya bean plant and the grain when I went to study in the US.
These soya beans are really new to most of us who grew up in the African reserves or townships.
We shall later see why farmer training is going to be vital in the domestication of this little-known, but very strategic legume crop among indigenous farmers.
So there you have it: Soya was a white large-scale farm crop. Over 95 percent of the national soya crop came from large-scale white farms with only a very small amount coming from small-scale black commercial farms.
When I first attempted to carry out research and promotion of soya bean among communal area black farmers, I approached the Department of Research and Specialist Services and also AGRITEX, the Government extension department.
I also consulted the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) and senior academics in the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Zimbabwe.
I wanted to find out where to start.
I also wrote to donor organisations like Rockefeller, Ford and Kellogg Foundations to seek funding for research and promotion of soya bean production among smallholder communal farmers.
To my amazement, I was advised by virtually all the organisations and individuals that I approached, that soya bean is a crop that is ‘too sophisticated’ for African peasant farmers.
It is a crop for large scale white farmers, I was politely advised.
It was alleged the crop involves so many technical requirements beyond the understanding of poor African farmers.
This meant all black farmers.
Was this wholesale shutting out of black farmers from soya bean production, also accepted by the new black technocrats manning the Government institutions?
I was stunned.
I am also an African.
With little effort, the Americans had taught me the science and technologies of soya bean production.
I was a teacher.
Surely I could teach my fellow Africans.
I was discouraged, but not dissuaded.
Of course, there were indeed several issues that made soya bean production a challenge for black farmers.
But these issues had little to do with the ‘sophistication’ of the crop as I later found out. Exclusion of Africans from the soya value chain was part of the colonial strategy of excluding Africans from lucrative crops just as much as it was linked to poor agro-ecological conditions in African reserves.
There were no markets and no extension support for Africans to produce soya bean.
The Conservation and Extension. (CONEX) department served the large scale commercial farmers almost exclusively.
The poor agro-ecological conditions cited as challenges for soya bean production by blacks were also a result of the diabolical colonial practice that deliberately and forcibly relocated Africans to areas of low agricultural potential.
As they say: ‘One cannot get blood out of a stone’.
The Africans squeezed and squeezed but perennial hunger and persistent poverty was all they got from the barren reserves.
Now that the African farmers have gained access to highly productive land, they need capacitation to become successful producers of soya bean and other lucrative crops.
Let us conclude this introductory section by placing the narrative into its historical context. The white invaders of our country found the indigenous black people occupying the most fertile soils.
They chased the Africans from their lands and forcibly resettled them in African reserves with very poor sandy, shallow soils.
These reserves also had very low rainfall, were full of tsetse flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. As more white people came from Britain and Europe, they identified those areas occupied by the indigenous Africans with good soils and high rainfall.
The colonial white Government gazetted all these fertile lands for Europeans to establish their farms.
Africans were forced to become farm labourers for the whiteman or chased out to go to the dry infertile African Reserves.
So we can see why the whites believed blacks could not grow soya beans.
They knew that the poor weather (hot temperatures and low rainfall) and sandy soil conditions were unsuitable for soya bean production.
In subsequent articles I want to share my experiences with readers on how we fought and destroyed the myth about Africans being unable to conquer a ‘sophisticated crop’, soya bean, through the University of Zimbabwe-led Soya bean Promotion Programme.