SCOTT A. THOMPSONTHE B-1 ROAD between Ondangwa and Oshakati was awash in a sea of green and yellow on Friday afternoon, as fourteen brand-new John Deere tractors made the journey to their new owners’ homesteads in the Ohangwena, Omusati, Oshana and Oshikoto regions.
Earlier that morning, the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry veterinary station in Ondangwa hosted dignitaries and conservation agriculture stakeholders from the four dry-land crop producing regions in north-central Namibia.
There, a ceremony was held to formally hand over tractors and rippers to local entrepreneurs who financed the agricultural equipment through a special agri-business loan from Kongalend – a Namibian development micro-finance service provider.
The event marked the culmination of more than a year of collaborative efforts to counter the effects of climate change, empower small business owners, develop local economies and increase food security through the promotion of conservation agriculture. To that effect, the governor of Oshana, Clemens Kashuupulwa, who was in attendance at Friday’s ceremony, noted that “government and stakeholders are working very hard to support farmers to increase food security.
The tractors and rippers provided through the Kongalend loan packages will indeed assist farmers in increasing yields from their fields in the interest of food security.”
Specifically, conservation agriculture techniques increase rainwater retention and soil fertility using four-by-four tractors and deep furrow rippers to break northern Namibia’s increasingly common hardpan soil. The results are improved root development and increased yields.
A large-scale push for the adoption of conservation agriculture practices began in early 2012, with commencement of the USAID-funded Namibia Conservation Agriculture Project (NCAP), which is coordinated by NCBA CLUSA, and rolled out through its implementing partners, the Namibia National Farmers Union (NNFU) and the Ondangwa-based NGO Creative Entrepreneurs Solutions (CES).
Marie Johansson, the CEO and founder of NCAP implementing partner CES, explains that “farmers who have tried conservation agriculture methods and seen the results simply do not want to go back to using conventional methods.”
The project is training more than 10 000 small-scale farmers in conservation agriculture techniques to date.
While conservation agriculture has been proven a potent remedy for the widespread ills of soil degradation and climate change, its techniques are capital intensive.
As a result, the necessary agricultural equipment is in high demand and short supply, meaning that farmers seeking to implement conservation agriculture methods in northern villages have been unable to do so in many cases.
In March this year, a group of government officials and conservation agriculture stakeholders gathered at Ondangwa to solve the problem. Their solution was to capacitate local entrepreneurs through Kongalend’s loan package to provide tillage services in support of conservation agriculture implementation on small-scale farms across northern Namibia.
Friday’s tractor handover event symbolised an initial, yet vital, step toward achieving that goal.
Kongalend’s chairman Tshoombe Ndadi identified the lack of working capital as an impediment to conservation agriculture implementation.
He explains that “there was a deficiency in terms of the tools available to practically employ conservation agriculture methods, and the farmers lacked access to working capital to acquire the appropriate tractors, so we designed a program to spread tractors to more households” in order to “deliver significant yields to communal farmers and also transform the methods that they use to maximize outputs and conserve the land.”
In a moment indicative of the excitement and optimism surrounding Friday’s handover ceremony, new tractor owners momentarily passed up food and refreshments in order to start their new tractor’s engines, hoot horns and proudly pose for photographs among gathered friends, family and other guests.
However, new tractor owner and tillage service provider Kristofina Kandombo noted that “the hard work has only begun.”
She said while “most of us who are recipients of these tractors are so excited, the focal point is not the receipt of the tractors, but that we have to work hard when it comes to providing services to our communities. It is of no point for me to receive a tractor and park it in my garage. I have to provide ripping services to the community in order to improve their harvest and yields.”
Kandombo was one of several women to receive the keys to a new tractor on Friday. This important point was not lost on the gathered audience, which rose to enthusiastic applause when implementing partner CES highlighted the fact that one-third of the new tractor owners were women.
Four additional John Deere tractors and rippers will be handed over today at the Agro guesthouse in Rundu to support NCAP implementation in the Kavango East and West regions. Ndadi noted that the Kongalend special agri-business loans “will remain open indefinitely” for qualified applicants.
