Why I gave up fertilizer : A personal testimony from Zimbabwe

Ezekiel and Ella Makunike are retired civil servants in Zimbabwe, now engaged in commercial agro-ecological farming of herbs and vegetables on their smallholding in Harare.

They also grow maize for home consumption. Over the years they have successfully experimented with ways to grow a healthy, high-yielding maize crop without using fertilizer. This goes against the grain in a country where the idea of growing the staple crop with heavy fertilizer use is deeply ingrained amongst both smallholders and large-scale farmers.

His personal testimony of what made him question and abandon fertilizer use :

When we were growing up in the 1930s and '40s my parents were very succesful farmers. They grew maize, rapoko (millet), groundsnuts and other crops, using cattle manure and practicising crop rotation as taught by the agricultural extension officers of those days. They had excellent crops every year.

In the mid 1950s, the new extension officers introduced chemical fertilizer. It came as an innocent-looking white substance, and some mistook it for table salt. The extension officers told our parents, "Now you do not need to worry about cattle manure. The fertilizer will do the job for you. Just sprinkle a little around each maize plant and after two weeks you will see wonders!"

The maize did indeed grow miraculously and the yield was excellent. The rural farmers came to rely more on fertilizers than on cattle manure and crop rotation. However, as the years went by the soil became tired from not being fed as before, and to get good yields one had to apply more fertilizer each year than the year before. While the fertilizer fed the plant, it did nothing for the soil!

I did not follow my father's example of going into farming in my early life, but I began practising
natural farming in my homestead garden, which depended on compost made from yard and garden refuse. I have not used chemical fertilizer since 1982 when my family bought our Harare home. I have been sharing this method of sustainable farming with many friends, and have come to know about organizations here at home and all over the world that share my convictions and experiences.

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Given the importance of maize in the diet and economies of many Africans, how to grow this large-hectarage crop successfully without fertilizer remains one of the greatest challenges to sustainable farming being taken more seriously by extension workers, commercial farmers and policy makers in much of Africa. Until that is clearly demonstrated to the many sceptics, sustainable farming will be recognized for having a role, but remain on the peripheries of the discussion on African agricultural productivity and food security rather than at the center.