Organic agriculture, natural way for farmers to go
RECENTLY when a group of journalists attended a one week seminar on Ecological Organic Agriculture in Mwanga, Kilimanjaro Region organized by SJS Organic Centre for Excellence in collaboration with Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM), farming God’s way dominated the talk.
One might be tempted to ask, God’s way? Obviously the first man, Adam, lived in a natural garden full of natural unpolluted shamba, where fruits of all sorts and other vegetation (read his crops for food) thrived with natural fertilisers.
From his farm, there were all sorts of herbs for medicine and animals to provide him with food. In a nutshell life was natural, implying that organic agriculture sustained the health of soil, ecosystem and people.
This is a system that relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effect seen in the modern world.
Looked at keenly, organic agriculture besides being natural and cheap to a farmer maintains and improves soil fertility, structure and biodiversity, and above all minimizes soil erosion.
Its practice in many cases reduces the risks of human, animal, and environmental exposure to toxic materials and ensures a farmer with natural unpolluted crops.
The benefits may be many, but its approach of reducing non-renewable energy use and by decreasing agrochemical needs (these require high quantities of fossil fuel to be produced), should be noted as vital in a compromising agriculture.
As the world has been trying to contain with Climate Change, it is only organic agriculture that has been able to contribute/mitigate to the greenhouse effect and global warming through its ability to sequester carbon in the soil.
This is an area, where peasants should be further enlightened on because it has no major complications like buying chemicals and seeds every season to plant and expects good yields.
It is natural with components like crop rotation, maintenance and enhancement of soil fertility through biological nitrogen fixation, addition of organic manure and use of soil microorganisms, crop residues, biopesticide, and biogas slurry.
With the above background and given the economic statuses of many local farmers/peasants, it is only organic farming that would bail them out of poverty and hunger in their setups.
But these farmers would not be enlightened and helped if those tasked to educate them are locked in offices and urban areas and rarely visit them in the farms.
