By HELEN ZULU in Kapiri Mposhi –
AGRO Dealers in Kapiri Mposhi District in Central Province have embraced the use of electronic cards by farmers under the Conservation Agriculture Scaling Up (CASU) project to buy inputs.
The agro dealers said the use of electronic cards had helped them to increase business sales as they usually service between 30 to 40 clients per day.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in July 2015 introduced electronic cards to benefit almost 20,000 farmers countrywide to enable them swipe and buy inputs from agro-dealers under the conservation agriculture programme.
Mukango Agro dealer shop director Daniel Chibo said the use of electronic cards had helped participating farmers under conservation agriculture acquire quality products to attain better yields.
He was speaking when European Union (EU) ambassador to Zambia and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Alessandro Mariani led a team of FAO officials and ministry of Agriculture officers to get feedback on e-voucher experiences at Kapiri Mposhi boma.
“The system we are using now is cost-effective and addresses the objective of conservation agriculture.
The programme has enabled farmers, especially small-scale ones make better choices when selecting products for their farming activities,” he said.
Mr Chibo said the move by FAO to improve the capacity of smallholder farmers to embrace conservation agriculture would lead to food security in the country.
He said the initiative had increased the coverage of farmers, adding that the system was quick as it would service a farmer within five to ten minutes.
And Bejack farmers’ friend director Jane Luhanga said farmers in the district had started appreciating the conservation technology, adding that this had increased the capacity for the agro dealers by 25 per cent.
“We are happy to note that the use of the electronic cards has really helped us increase our capacity by 25 per cent, farmers have started appreciating the conservation technology,” she said.
Ms Luhanga further urged EU to consider including market access for soyabeans and groundnuts into the programme to help the farmers have easy access to the market.
During the 2014-2015 farming season, a total of 17,438 out of 19,000 herbicide and seed vouchers were successfully redeemed through an SMS and online input voucher redeeming process.
This year, the project has introduced cost effective and secure smart cards for redeeming inputs and has reached 92 per cent success rate.
The project has moved focus this year from demonstration plots to application of CA in entire fields.