42 Centres Receive Farm Mechanization Equipments!! GOVERNMENT has distributed farm mechanisation equipment to 42 centers across the country. This is aimed at ensuring availability of farm machinery to small holder farmers who have no capacity to purchase their own equipment. Ministry of Agriculture Permanent Secretary for Technical Services John Mulongoti said the development is also part of the mitigation measures put in place by Government with the current devastating impact of climate change affecting most households. “One of the interventions which we have put in place is to promote mechanisation. Government has procured farm equipment such as tractors, boom sprayers and the like and we have distributed them to 42 farmer training institutes,” stated Mulongoti. “We are promoting irrigation, we are also teaching our farmers water harvesting so that when such a thing as a drought visits us again we won’t really be able to stress.”He said Government has also developed a Zambia Electronic Single Window System to facilitate increased agriculture trade for farmers who want to export their products. And Zambia Agriculture Research Institute (ZARI) director Dickson Nguni emphasised that there’s need for farmers to understand their agro ecological zones. “When we are developing or generating crop varieties, considerations has to be given to the period that a particular region receives rainfall and therefore we tailored our production and processes towards this period,” revealed Nguni.
