Farming in Zambia: How we Plan to Grow Our Field Crops with a Tough Rain Season Ahead

[@jamesweeksbey4143]

I love your content Good Brother, long live and thrive MONDO FARMS

[@mondofarms4343]

Thanks James. Much appreciated.

[@gabrielangello9702]

Top class! This may as well have been titled 'How to face off El Nino and headbutt it back to the Pacific with the right mindset'

[@mondofarms4343]

Thanks. I was rewatching this video last night. It gave me some inspiration as the weather situation has now got to quite extreme levels. Basically what was forecast is coming to pass. We're having to start irrigating this week due to a long dry spell.

[@Ravensroost81]

I grew up on my grandfathers farm near Chalimbana, and left in 1969. I have very nostalgic sentiments toward Zambia and Lusaka, and I came across your channel while looking up info on farming in the area. Wonderful to see you doing so well. I have gone through a whole lot of your vids here, just to see the farms, the bush and get a bit of the vibe of the places I remember from my childhood. I know what hard work it is to grow food for a nation, so big respect! I would love to travel back to see my old homeland.

[@mondofarms4343]

Lovely to hear from you. Winterthorn is situated just upstream of where the Chalimbana River flows into the Chongwe.

[@milesmurray6730]

Thanks for another great video. Very interesting that you are reducing maize hectares & increasing sunn hemp this year. Smart move! We have just bought some sunn hemp seeds based, in part, on your previous videos. We are starting our 3rd season growing sorghum in Kalomo, if you ever decide you want to experiment with indigenous, drought tolerant crops we'd be happy to share what we've learnt.

[@mondofarms4343]

OMG, that is such an honour to be given. It does a lot to banish the farming imposter syndrome that I suffer sometimes. I'm ever so glad to hear that our videos have been that helpful. I would like to bring the team down for a visit next month. Pls may you send me a WhatsApp or email so we can make a plan.

[@mlshilubane1095]

My farming magician 🎩 I have listened to this video from start to finish. Everything you have said has made me a better farmer, thank you.

[@mondofarms4343]

Glad it helped

[@gorarenyu6966]

Please do an episode on how you deal with the puff adder issue on your farm

[@mondofarms4343]

We hear you.

[@jasonthatcher8281]

This is quite awesome, I have of late come across No Till. But honestly it makes sense, leaving the chaff on the field keeps the moisture in the soil, when it rains, the raindrops get dispersed thus cutting erosion.

[@mondofarms4343]

I'm glad we have finally started to do it. Breaking old habits is hard.

[@ange6741]

Oh wow, took me back down memory lane re: 70s. I grew up in Makeni, too😂. I know exactly what you mean. Hey, I love your content. Very informative. I should contact you when next I am in Lusaka for more tips. Keep doing what you do. Thank you

[@mondofarms4343]

Thanks.

[@mustafampinganjira9938]

I'm raning lot from you besecuse I'm improving my farming one Zambia one Nation I'm writting from Malawi

[@mondofarms4343]

Hi Mustafa. That is great to hear. All the best.

[@philiplongwe8012]

The knowledge you have been sharing about farming is shaping me to be a good farmer.continue blessing us with great content.happy festive season

[@mondofarms4343]

Thank you, I will

[@accidentalhomestead5522]

I have a full time job and view this channel to learn a bit and be encouraged. I want to be a gentleman farmer in a few years.

[@mondofarms4343]

All the best. It's good to prepare in advance.

[@panganayimakosienyi8690]

This is great.So much advice is available here !!!!

[@mondofarms4343]

Glad it was helpful!

[@Nidhin-j5n]

Hi sir...Your videos are interesting and motivational. Would like to have an discussion with you on the piping system which you have implemented in your farms.

[@mondofarms4343]

Thank you 😊.

[@mandlakhumalo7385]

Excellent content. I was looking forward to view your farm as like your previous post.

[@mondofarms4343]

Glad you enjoyed it! It's been a busy time, and we didn't have time to insert a lot of B-roll into this video to break up the talking head sections.

[@93VIDEO]

Thank U for this good video !

[@mondofarms4343]

My pleasure!

[@raemtan2357]

Keep it up. From Singapore, would like to visit you someday.

[@mondofarms4343]

Maybe one day!

[@JesusisLord78]

Good day Mr Mondo please make a video how you guys prepared the land thank you

[@mondofarms4343]

We hear you.

[@Pentagathusosaurus]

Nice video, great to hear positive attitudes when dealing with these effects. Do you use swales or similar earthworks to help slow down water runoff in the rainy season?

[@mondofarms4343]

Not yet. We had wanted to start putting some in before the rain season started last year, but we gave up due to too many moving parts and other work pressure. We hope to get statted on building some swales as well as check dams, etc this year.

[@SheneilBrandonJohn]

why not use drip irrigation over the sprinkler ?

[@mondofarms4343]

We will be using drip irrogation in some fields, depending on their location and elevation. And of course, where we already have some piping in place.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

My understanding is it's easier to use the sprinkler and takes less infrastructure.

[@munsanjemweene]

Thanks for this video. Interesting, and a pity, that the season has played out exactly as you had forecasted back in December! On our own little farming project, we made the choice to go for a smaller number of acres in order to ensure we could afford to irrigate season-round. It has paid off significantly, given the dry spells. Our entire crop would have died without it. Shout out for your drip irrigation video, which helped map the territory. Sorry to hear that there are some unfortunate, ignorant and bigotted individuals in the comments.

[@mondofarms4343]

Hi Ba Munsanje. I'm glad to hear that the video impacted you so positively. Yes, the season has been rough, and we have a lot of trouble ahead. We just have to keep pushing.

[@jackholman5008]

in botswana its always tough

[@mondofarms4343]

Gosh. I can only imagine what it's like. I've been watching some videos that really make me admire how Botswana's agricultural sector is growing. There was one showing a farm with vegetables growing under a huge shadehouse that made me green with envy.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

I looked up Gaborone, the capital city (which I understand is not representative of the country as a whole) and it would appear that most of the rain falls during the summer, and little enough falls combined with the average temperature that it's technically a half-desert. Is that true?

[@jackholman5008]

@@ellenorbjornsdottir1166 yes its true,its called kalahari desert

[@jasonthatcher8281]

I remember Roger Ramjet well.

[@mondofarms4343]

I loved it. Waiting each episode for him to pop one of those t nuclear powered pack pills. 😀😃

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

If you end up growing sorghum in the summer of '24/'25, will you provide a report on how it performs? Here it would be challenging because we have a very short growing season, bounded by frost rather than by water, but there are quad-dwarf and thus early-maturing sorghum (including sweet sorghum!) varieties which grow well here in Canada. I've rifled through FEWSNet's website before. It's sobering reading at the best of times. They're a US-funded independent nonprofit who try to predict famine. Normal to below normal rainfall + higher than normal temperature = drought. Higher temperature means the air can carry more water, and as it sweeps across land that has just been rained on or irrigated, it dries the land out faster (this is not a technical rendering, but I think it's pretty close to accurate). On the topic of SARS-2, the virus, I recently built a filter box for my house, because as much as we'd like to think it's gone away or become a non-problem, it has not, and with it becoming the hot season here (about a month ahead of schedule!) I am going to have to open my windows more often and for longer, and because I live in a built up area, that carries a risk of viruses. I wear a respirator when I leave my house (even to tend my crops in my backyard!) but that isn't going to work inside the house, where I need to process data on my computer, talk to strangers on my computer, cook food, eat food, and eventually, hopefully, also process the crops from my garden. Come to think of it, the type of fan I bought for the filter box could also make a good fan for a homemade winnowing machine, should I ever grow small grains like wheat, rye, or triticale, or intermediate grains like sorghum, both of which must, unless I'm mistaken, be winnowed. Your interpretation of that proverb sounds a lot like the English-language Aesop about the tortoise and the hare. Both the tortoise and the hare started the race at the same time, but because the hare had to take many rest stops due to leaping at a high rate, the slow and less likely to tire tortoise made more speed across the ground over the time of the race, and thus the tortoise, rather than the hare, won. I know it's not the same, but I think it represents a similar concept. No-till is sort of a non-concept for a home gardener. Until the advent of tools like a "roto-tiller", either you double dig, which is equivalent to ploughing, except that it also puts your back out, or you only disturb the soil to take up weeds and put them upon the compost pile. I cannot afford a roto-tiller, so about all the disturbance I even can do is running a hoe over the lawn to skim it off and convert that space to crops, as well as obviously double digging which I can only do to a limited degree as I am not the strongest or most flexible person on the planet. Here, planting a late maturing crop is a sure route to ruin. In Zambia you may be able to rescue it with irrigation, but here it would freeze out (or for winter wheat, rye, and triticale, start its cold hardening process, to come up next spring). Farmers in Alberta, in western Canada but to the east of me, are being told to "set realistic yield expectations" and plant low densities accordingly, because they are experiencing both drought and, in irrigable areas, a low availability of irrigation water. That would be similar to timing your crops based on the length of the rains, I suppose. Climate deniers: they are often from the global-North Anglophone states, which have a concentration of coal, oil and natural gas interests, which have propagandized us on how they're so essential so as to make us think it is not useful to set limits on the very CO2 emissions which are driving the derangements in climate systems. I suspect that these interests are also driving climate change denialism, especially because it's less immediately sensible in the global North (there was a Senator in the US, Jim Inhofe I think was his name, who brought a snowball into their Senate (the upper house of Congress, their parliament) a while back and used it to say basically "it still snows, so climate change isn't real" - he's a Republican, of course, which is their version of the UK's Tories - basically, large business interests, capitalism, corruption, hatred towards homosexuals, towards minorities, towards people who speak different languages, and towards the poor). I wonder if you have experience with the "pigeon pea" (Cajanus cajan). There's no particular reason I should ask, except that rumour has it that it does reasonably well in dry places.

[@mondofarms4343]

Thanks Ellen. Always nice to hear from you. Sorry that I struggle to respond to your comments. Hope you're well.