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  • From: <shashi.pkumar@wipro.com>
  • To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Zambia's farming revolution poster boy
  • Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 09:42:13 +0530

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8582353.stm

By Kieron Humphrey
Lusaka, Zambia

Elleman Mumba makes an unlikely celebrity. He is not a singer nor a
footballer - he is a 54-year-old peasant farmer from southern Zambia.

Yet he has appeared on the front page of a national newspaper and been
interviewed for numerous radio and television programmes.

They said I was using juju in my field. I felt very bad, but I knew I
wasn't using witchcraft

What explains his fame?

Mr Mumba grows maize and groundnuts on his small plot of land in
Shimabala, just south of Lusaka.

Feeding his family used to be a problem.

"The yield was very little. We were always looking for hand-outs; we had
to rely on relief food."

-> Quiet agricultural revolution

Like many farmers, Mr Mumba had no oxen of his own to plough his field.

He had to wait in line to hire some, which meant he often failed to
plant as soon as the first rains fell - with disastrous consequences.
Elleman Mumba and his chaka hoe [Photo by Kieron Humphrey]
A chaka hoe means there is no need to plough with oxen

Researchers say that for each day's delay, the potential yield shrinks
by between 1% and 2%.

Then, in 1997, Mr Mumba suddenly found himself in the vanguard of a
quiet agricultural revolution.

His wife had been given free training in a system called conservation
farming, and persuaded him to try it.

Conservation farming is about doing less to get more. Instead of
ploughing entire fields, farmers till and plant in evenly spaced basins.

Only a tenth of the land area is disturbed.

This reduces erosion and run-off - where soil and nutrients are washed
away by rain.

"That season I had 68 bags of maize - enough to feed my family and buy
four cattle," he says, blazing with pride at the recollection.

Using just a wide-bladed traditional chaka hoe, Mr Mumba had dug a
series of shallow rectangular planting basins in his field during the
dry season.

It was a tough job to break the sun-baked soil, but he persevered, and
was ready to sow his seed with the first rains.

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