To reinforce Government's mandate of centralising cattle sales through village business units, the Livestock and Meat Advisory Council (LMAC) has called for the capacitation of AFC Holdings to buy breeding stock intended for slaughter.
This comes as Government moves to streamline and ensure efficient management of livestock transactions to avoid a disruption of the ongoing national herd re-building exercise.
LMAC executive administrator, Dr Reneth Mano said: "As LMAC we propose that Government capacitates AFC Holdings to provide funding for all our livestock research stations involved in heifer multiplication programmes to buy all productive breeding cattle offered for sale as slaughter stock.
"This will preserve them as breeding stock for increasing the supply of heifers in 2025/26 so as to facilitate expeditious recovery of the livestock herd from the drought."
Dr Mano said by removing 20 percent to 30 percent of productive animals from the slaughter market in this manner, the Government would be effectively supporting beef cattle producer prices while ensuring that the livestock sector has the capacity to bounce back better from the drought in 2025.
"We really applaud Government for establishing VBUs, as institutions for coordination of farmers to undertake farming as a profit-driven business for increasing rural incomes and enhancing livelihood security of farmers in every village leaving no one and no place behind.
By combining private family farming business strategies with village-wide and district-wide smallholder collective action, business strategies in marketing and VBUs are potentially a very potent institution for helping farmers," said Dr Mano.
VBUs can help farmers reduce cost of farm inputs through bulk buying, capitalise on economies of scale to produce enough sunflower to crush into cooking oil for their village community and enough wheat to ensure local supply of affordable loaves of bread for every villager every day, he added.
Among other benefits of VBUs is that they can buy in bulk supplementary stock feeds at discounted wholesale prices from partner Stockfeed Manufacturers Association (SMA) member companies, aggregating farm produce for bulk marketing and planned sales of livestock (road runners, goats, cattle) across farmers in the district network of VBUs.
Organising farmers to sell their livestock and surplus grain in bulk directly to an abattoir or stockfeed manufacturer offering the best producer price will remove many opportunistic middlemen.
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VBUs have the potential to transform the way industry has been doing business with smallholder farmers.
The Government has since outlined various emergency measures to help smallholder cattle owners in drought-hit districts to access adequate survival rations, which can sustain productive cattle over the fast approaching livestock hunger season extending from August to November.
Smallholder cattle owners are fully aware that the condition of their communal grazing areas will deteriorate rapidly over the next four months and will lack the carrying capacity to keep the current cattle population alive.
"Fortunately, the majority of smallholder and newly resettled cattle owners have experienced severe droughts over the past 10 to 20 years and most of them already know what they must to do to save their cattle from drought- induced starvation deaths," he said.
The Government has always encouraged farmers to sell some of their older, less productive cattle and use part of the money to buy basic supplementary ruminant feed materials to keep their most productive breeding and working cattle sufficiently well fed to survive the coming four months of limited supply of biomass from the communal grazing areas.
