Thirty‐two per cent of communal farmers had applied all the officially recommended fertiliser to their 1990/91 maize crop, often by obtaining these inputs on credit in lieu of grain sales receipts from the subsequent harvest. Yet. yields were so low that 48 per cent of these farmers would have been unable to retain sufficient grain to satisfy their families’ minimum requirements, if they had reimbursed the full cost of the input credit.
The majority (64 per cent) of farmers had deviatedfrom the recommended practice by adopting ‘low external input strategies’. A key feature of most of these strategies was the substitution of manure for part or all of the recommended fertiliser. In three of the four communal areas studied, this had improved the chances not only of recovering input costs, but also of achieving maize self‐sufficiency.
These results suggest that policy‐makers should shift emphasis from a dependence on costly external inputs to the integration of low levels of fertiliser with a range of more natural methods of soil improvement, in an effort to improve household food security in the communal areas. 相似文献