Pfumvudza, the revolutionary farming method alleviating poverty in Zimbabwe

But a revolutionary new method of cropping that needs little water and no draught power, has caught on among subsistence farmers and has alleviated hunger among poor households in peri-urban and rural areas benefiting 3.5 million people.

Dubbed Pfumvudza (which means “new season” in the main local language), it is a meticulously applied form of conservation agriculture in which farmers prepare a prescribed piece of land (16m by 39m) and are supplied with specific packs of inputs and produce a specific yield per plot.

“The primary objective of this initiative is that a family should feed itself. It removes the burden of excessive labour in terms of field preparation and collection of mulch material. It provides all the inputs required to produce a crop, yet is so simple that once farmers are envisioned they are no longer reliant on the inputs to be successful,” says the Pfumvudza concept note.

The bulk of Zimbabwe’s 16 million people live in rural areas but there has been a proliferation of urban poor in recent years due to climate change. Zimbabwe experiences a drought every three years leading to rural urban drift. The El Nino phenomenon is set to worsen the situation this cropping season. 

“For resource-poor folks, Pfumvudza is a lifesaver in a number of respects. First, it entails establishing planting stations manually using simple hoes, which are accessible to the very poor. Second, Pfumvudza practices make maximum use of available moisture, making it ideal in drought seasons,” a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, Department of Community and Social Development, Taruvinga Magwiroto said in an interview.

The uptake has been impressive and the national expansion can only be described as ambitious.

“We are targeting 500,000 beneficiaries in towns and 3 million in rural areas. If we do that on 9.5 million plots, we have around 400,000 hectares of Pfumvudza leading to food security,” said the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Obert Jiri.

Due to the fact that conservation agriculture is initially very labour intensive, many farmers are discouraged from continuing the practice threatening its sustainability but the free inputs are an incentive.

“It’s backbreaking work but we have no choice because we have no draught power,” said an elderly woman beneficiary of Pfumvudza. Rural households lost their livestock to the frequent droughts due to climate change.

“The classic Pfumvudza involves hard manual work. But its popularity can be traced to the fact that it was promoted as a package including free inputs. So, people didn't really have much choice because they love free inputs. In that sense, it's a necessary evil,” Magwiroto said.

An agronomist supervising the project in one of the country’s 10 provinces said the sustainability of Pfumvudza depended on people seeing its “vision”. 

“We envision a situation where the beneficiaries will meet the vision and buy their own inputs in the near future.

“The inputs are supplied under the Presidential Input Scheme whose longevity is debatable considering the unstable economy.”

Initially concentrating on farming the staple maize, Pfumvudza is expanding to include other food crops such as sorghum, pearl millet, groundnuts, sunflower, soya beans and sugar beans.