IRRIGATION AND PUMP MANAGEMENT COMMERCIAL FARMER TRAINING
The world’s food production industry is growing each day in response to growing food demands. This has led to excessive use of our world’s natural resources such as ground water. The Zambian-German Agricultural Knowledge and Training Centre (AKTC) supports natural resources conservation in Zambia and Africa at large. AKTC in collaboration with KSB Zambia and BayWa Variable Rain organised a commercial farmers’ training in stateof-the-art irrigation management and pumps. The training which was held on 18th February 2021 in the conference hall at the Golden Valley Agricultural Research Trust (GART) in Chisamba, Central Province of Zambia, aimed at showcasing modern
AKTC Participants in the 2020 GART National Seedfair Amidst COVID-19
The year 2020 has been quiet unproductive for many firms, institutions and businesses around the globe. With the coming in of Covid19, businesses and a number of major events were shut down while others cancelled. In Zambia, the spread of Covid19 led to the cancellation of the 2020 AgriTech Expo as well as the Farmers’ Agricultural and Commercial show which usually takes place in the months of April and August, respectively. Apart from the cancellation of such events, a good number of institutions including agricultural institutions slowed down operations in the quest to adhere to the set Covid19 measures. However,
Farming as a Business
Why farmers are encouraged to learn, understand, and practice Farming as a Business methods? Farming is a Business: Farming has to be treated just like any form of business were the owner’s major motive is to maximise profit and not as a pass time venture. The only way to maximise profit is by trying to keep production costs as low as possible and aim to sell the produce at the highest possible market price and this can only be done through good management, planning and market research. It is said for any venture, “if you fail to plan you
AKTC MODULAR TRAININGS APPROACH
Our New Strategy in Conducting Farmer Trainings The Zambian-German Agricultural Knowledge and Training Centre (AKTC) recorded a high number of farmer participation in last year’s (2019) trainings. Not only did the centre record high participation rates, but also managed to reach out to all the ten provinces of Zambia in terms of training delivery. All such achievements were made possible through the engagement of two different training approaches. The first approach was referred to as the ‘combined trainings’ approach. With this method, a maximum of 5 different training topics would be organised to take place in a space of
Climate Adapted Farming Methods Field Day
The adverse impact of climate change world over cannot be overemphasised. In some African countries, the changes in the weather pattern are not only hard to cope with but have caused hunger among poor families. In Zambia for instance, the previous farming season (2018/2019) recorded a poor harvest in many parts of the country, leaving many families hungry as they could not manage to have access to maize and mealie meal (staple food) due to high prices on the market. Climate change has undoubtedly impacted the Zambian agricultural sector negatively. For this reason, the Zambian government in cooperation with other