Twelve families of smallholder farmers in Shashe, Zimbabwe have turned a total of 184 hectares into an agroecology school for smallholder farmers. The learning model is however different from the conventional classroom set up. These families have created agroecology centers of excellence on their homesteads where they practice and teach agroecology as their way of life.
“We are a school of practice, not a school of blackboards, ball pens, papers and pictures. We are a school that is made up of practitioners, farmers who are actually on the ground, demonstrating and advocating for issues concerning smallholder farmers such as poverty, climate change, and healing the earth,” says Nelson Mudzingwa (51) one of the founders of the Shashe school of Agroecology.
“We organise farmer field days and workshops where farmers can come to stay with us, learn from our examples, taste the food we produce, and take up what they would have learnt, adapt it to their own situation and share with other farmers,” he adds.
Nelson says the activities of farmers in the Shashe Agroecology School are based on the understanding and management of water and soil.
“Our work on agroecology in the Shashe Agroecology School is centred on two very important resources, that is water and soil, where we are actually talking about managing the water cycle and in the soil we are talking about managing the nutrient cycle. Having achieved those two practices would mean that we can begin to walk a very long journey on the practice of agroecology where we then look at activities that go along with managing soil and water, “says Nelson.
Nelson says water harvesting is a must for farmers in Shashe because it is a very dry region.
“Regarding water, our practices are actually centred on harvesting every single drop of rain that we can get because we are in a region that receives 400mm annual rainfall. So water harvesting is one of those primary activities that each of the families within the Shashe Agroecology school is doing,” says Nelson.
With regards to the management of the nutrient cycle, Nelson says that farmers are doing composting, making biofertilisers and enriching soils using humus from the forests.
“When we are planting we do quite a lot of green manuring. We do crop rotation where we integrate lots of leguminous plants to fix nitrogen into the soil,” says Nelson, adding that they use crops that provide lots of forage so that they have plenty of mulch to cover the soil while improving its fertility.
Nelson says managing the water and soil enables smallholder farmers to then put agroecology principles into practice. He says Shashe farmers focus on five critical areas. The first is diversity.
“We expect each household to have diverse food crops, diverse livestock, diverse natural medicinal plants and herbs and diverse other plant species so that they can have many sources of food crops and other important resources. So diversity is very critical in our agroecology practices,” explains Nelson.
The second critical focus area for the Agroecology school is recycling of waste.
“When it comes to recycling, we want to make sure that there is that interlinkage between the different practices that a farmer could be doing. For example, I am keeping fish and I use chicken droppings or kitchen waste to feed the fish. Once the water in the fish pond is rich with nutrients I use it to irrigate the garden, “says Nelson.
Resilience, culture and food tradition are the other critical aspects of agroecology practices at the Shashe school of Agroecology.
“We are in a very dry region and so we are experiencing climate change impacts faster. We will need to have safety nets that can protect us from climate change shocks. We have brought in the aspect of growing small grains which are drought tolerant. We are also promoting rearing small livestock that can tolerate dry conditions. We have brought in the issue of culture, where we are supposed to perform rituals and ceremonies. Lastly, we pay attention to what we eat. We eat food that will keep the body healthy, protect the body from any illness,” says Nelson.
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