Feature: Farmers keen to try new farming techniques to improve productivity

Berio Simasiku has been farming at a village 40 km outside Katima Mulilo in Namibia's northeast Zambezi Region for over a decade.

For years, she endured losses and poor yields due to climate change and lack of knowledge about new adoptive farming techniques. "I used the same farming method year after year; planting maize on my plot year-on-year and weeding the same way," said Simasiku.

For quite a long a time, conservation agriculture and new adoptive methods of farming were unheard of to her.

But her farming approach is set to change after attending a demonstrative agricultural intervention on conservation agriculture. "I realized why productivity on my farm was stagnant," she said on Thursday.

The agricultural development session, organized by the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry in Katima Mulilo infuses farming practices with conservation with the aim to help farmers adapt to new farming techniques and conservation to improve productivity, said Senior Agricultural Technician, Obrien Nyambwa.

The demonstrative session is an intervention under the conservation agriculture programme that was initiated to enable the Ministry to transform agricultural practices, by shifting the paradigm towards strong community-based and government-supported approach to farming, with resource inputs and contributions, also, from the private sector and other partners.

"We demonstrate to the farmers various methods of farming and how they can infuse new and traditional methods of farming to improve yields," said Nyambwa.

For example, farmers can mulch by applying a layer of material applied to the surface of an area of soil. With this technique, according to Nyambwa, farmers like Simasiku usually hard hit by a dry spell will be able control the evaporation of the moisture. "When you put mulch, the area will not dry as fast as it initially would and thus a farmer preserves the crops," he said.

He also discouraged farmers from making seeds from hybrids and rather said that farmers buy seeds from seeds retails each farming season.

Indeed, the session is proving to be helpful to farmers. "Some of the words and farming methods were but vocabularies to me. But through this platform I will be able to vent and test what could possibly work for me and not. This session helped me re-think my approach towards farming such as intercropping and crop rotation," said Simasiku.

According to the agricultural technician, crop rotation is another method of conservation farming which benefits farmers through reduced need for tillage while provides permanent soil cover and reduces residue.

"With inter-cropping, that is planting maize with horticulture, crops will be able to get more nitrogen. Therefore, this is the form of fertilizer and farming technique that should be adopted by every farmer," he said.

In the interim, as for Simasiku, the farmer said that she has found a solution to her farming hoes of non-productivity that thwarted her.

"The session is a leap way for adopting new farming techniques. Surely this is a new beginning for a revamped farming approach. I am not looking back," she said, as she waits for the session to end and go back to her farm and apply her newly acquired knowledge. Endit