Permaculture in community farming, Zimbabwe

Name of sustainable practice or practices Permaculture in community farming, Zimbabwe

Name of main actor Chikukwa Ecological Land Use Community Trust (CELUCT)

Type of actors involved Indigenous communities (including community farming)

Livestock Species Chicken, Goat

Country Zimbabwe

Agro-ecological region Tropical and Sub-tropical

Main feature of best practice Improving environmental sustainability including biodiversity conservation

Key features of livestock farming system Permaculture

Year practice/management strategies started to be implemented 1994

Key practices implemented to improve sustainability of livestock management Animal keeping is an integral part of permaculture practices. In Chikukwa community permaculture strategies fertilizer is not used. Instead, manure is used. Farmers were taught to interrelate the field and animals that are being kept. Manure from kraal is brought to the fields. And the residues from the fields to the animal. The cycle in this way relates land, animal and people. A typical choice of small livestock for the home garden includes poultry, goats and pigeons.

Key impacts of the best practices on sustainability of farming system Integrating livestock keeping into crop production in this community has positive effects on nutrient use and efficiency in the ecosystem. Keeping livestock in this case does not overload environment with excess of nutrients. Permaculture techniques and principles connecting all elements of the farming system become a survival strategy. Permaculture strategies provided techniques to increase food production without investing money into most farming inputs. The farmers could build soil fertility without buying artificial fertilisers. Intercropping mixed varieties of plants and setting up plant guilds protected their gardens from pests. Using living fences reduced the need to buy fencing materials and simultaneously improved soil using nitrogen-fixing plants or mulching. The community developed and retained open pollinated varieties of maize so they did not have to depend on buying hybrid seeds. They learned how to save seeds from their vegetables and how to grow fruit trees using grafting techniques. Telling us how permaculture has improved her life, Permaculture created a complete closed system – manure to the fields, crops to the livestock and back around again. It allowed for crop diversity so that if one crop fails one year, they will still have food from another crop.

Constraints and opportunities observed during implementation of described practices Permaculture linked up traditional concepts and principles of effective and coordinated farming activities, best use of available resources and optimizing them without bringing harm to the ecosystem. There is no contradiction in terms of working with the land, working with traditions, between that concept and traditional concepts. The community’s ability to produce surplus food for sale was not of central interest to CELUCT and its members. But permaculture farms became successful because the decision of what to grow did not rely on market food prices. As in many African communities, twenty years ago some Chikukwa farmers were trying to make a living from cash crops (Lindhagen 2010). However, most farmers were preoccupied with the problem of providing food for their families while yields deteriorated and topsoil was being lost. Dealing with ever disappearing topsoils and falling market prices, permaculture was introduced at the right time to fix attention on sustainable food production for subsistence. For example, CELUCT carefully calculated the costs and income from selling peas on the market to find that the villagers were producing peas at a loss. Many farmers also decided not to grow coffee because it takes the best land for low coffee prices. This was a cost-benefit analysis that demonstrated how cash crops were not smart investments. This conclusion led the farmers to prioritize subsistence food production over participating in the destabilizing cash economy.

Contacts
Monika Goforth and Terry Leahy, University of Newcastle, Australia Article here: http://permaculturenews.org/2011/10/01/permaculture-successes-in-a-zimbabwean-community/ Project website: http://www.thechikukwaproject.com/