Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to distribute unused, or unproductive, land to landless rural laborers. The theory is that
people will invest much more effort in their own land than that of an employer. In prac-
tice, the reverse often happens. Because most countries have little frontier land that can
be brought under cultivation, the large plantations of individual land holders are often
seized and subdivided into small parcels. These are distributed to individuals that pre-
viously worked as laborers on the farm or to people from cities desiring land. This is
politically popular but economically disastrous.
A case in point is Zimbabwe. In November 2002 the government seized 14 million
hectares of land from large white farmers. This coincided with invasions and land grabs
by laborers, often with the death of the landowners. To make matters worse, a cyclical
dry period affected maize production. Large landowners were either forced off their
land or sold out at reduced prices. The result was a dramatic fall in maize production,
the staple food of many Zimbabweans. Before 2000, Zimbabwe was a net exporter of
maize to neighboring countries. At the end of the 2004/2005 crop year (maize is
planted in our fall and harvested in our spring) production had fallen to less than
one-third of previous levels and Zimbabwe was importing maize.
Small farmers in Zimbabwe traditionally cultivated maize, but their yields were
rarely greater than 2000 kg/ha. In contrast, large commercial farmer's yields rarely
dropped below 3000 kg/ha, often rising to 5000 kg/ha.
4
The loss of large commercial
farmers left most of the country's maize production in the hands of small farmers with
few resources to purchase fertilizers and hybrid seed needed to achieve high yields. The
net effect was an abrupt reduction in national maize production and a large increase in
imports of maize.
10.8
BUILDINGS
Most agricultural farms need buildings of some type. They may be for storage of
harvested grains, protection of livestock from weather or predators, to shield machinery
from rain, or to perform sorting and packaging of produce. In many developing countries
buildings constructed by subsistence farmers are made of locally available materials
such as adobe, reeds, or bamboo, as in the left picture of Figure 10.9. Larger, commercial
farmers often purchase complete buildings in a ready-to-construct package.
For any farmer, a building is an investment. For farmers trying to make a profit on
an enterprise, a building should be adequate for its purpose, but no more. Spending
large amounts of time and/or money on a structure that will outlive its usefulness is
not economically sound.
In the examples shown in Figure 10.9, a separate building made with woven
bamboo walls serves to store the maize harvest owned by the farmer in the Philip-
pines. This was made entirely from materials picked up by Donio. The farmer in
Ecuador is constructing a more solid swine building with concrete block to withstand
the movements of the animals and to protect them from predators. It will be finished
with a corrugated metal roof. One of the buildings on the commercial farm in the
United States was specially built for swine production. It has provision for manure
disposal
and automatic
watering
and
feeding.
In
each
case the
materials
were
