By Dr. Tony M. Monda
The approach to agriculture today differs vastly from when farmers got together shortly after the end of World War II, to exhibit their prized crops and livestock and exchange ideas at what today have become known as the Agricultural Shows in Zimbabwe.
The 2025 Harare Agricultural Show opened on Monday 25 August. While the objectives of these annual events remain the same – to showcase the best of Zimbabwe’s agriculture, promote industry and establish new markets. the approaches of today’s industrial agriculture are techno-scientific, economic and political – ie. policy-driven to achieve certain ends when they intervene in economies. They are the instruments that governments can use to change economic outcomes.
Effective policies change the behavior of producers, marketers and consumers to create new economic outcomes.
For example, from the 1950s, agricultural policy was a main driving force within the growing European Economic Community (EEC). During the 1950s, agriculture in France and the Netherlands had already recovered from wartime (1939-1945), damage and searched for new export markets.
Germany, that lost the war and many of its most productive agricultural regions, aimed at re-establishing its position as an industrial nation and expected to remain an importer of agrarian products.
These differences between France and Germany became the basis of the new European Economic Community – now the European Union (EU).
The implementation of socialist economic principles in the Soviet sphere of influence brought far-reaching changes In Eastern Europe.
In Eastern Germany a short-lived land reform divided the old estates into family farms, but after a few years the old estates were re-established as collective farms.
Collective and state farms were also established in other parts of Eastern Europe, most rigorously in the Soviet-conquered Baltic States. Elsewhere however, particularly in most parts of Poland, small-scale farmers were left untouched.
Agricultural policy In the United States is a complex and evolving network of governmental interventions and regulation and the marketing and distribution of food products.
These interventions have resulted in huge budgetary costs for the US federal government, large surpluses of farm products, major disputes with other countries and distorted international markets. These same programmes however have contributed to an agricultural sector whose productivity over much of the last century has been very spectacular in the US.
Current US agricultural policies, though redesigned approximately every 5 years, are rooted in the 1930s. Commodity and conservation programmes are a major feature of farm policies in the US, and include payments to farmers and farmland owners who are eligible for a variety of programmes offered at any one time.
Agricultural policy in Zimbabwe outlines four central components in its agenda – namely objectives, constraints, policies, and strategies; which in one way or another, are covered during ZAS’ agricultural shows held annually throughout the country.
But it is the techno-scientific and economic aspects of industrial agriculture – which has evolved to become new age and smart farming – that interests me most and which I frequently had the opportunity to discuss with the former minister of Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement who always showed a keen interest in what I advocated, especially the sustainable industrialisation of our agriculture if Zimbabwe is to achieve the economic realities in agricultural production as advocated by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and other agencies.
This modern form of farming refers to the industrialised production of crops, cattle, small livestock, poultry and even fish. It includes innovation in agricultural machinery – on display at ZAS’ agricultural show, and farming methods, genetic technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production and the creation of new markets for consumption.
In fact, most of the meat, dairy products such as milk and cheese, eggs, fruit and vegetables available in supermarkets worldwide today, are produced using methods of industrial agriculture.
These methods are widespread in developed nations that witnessed an agrarian transformation during the second half of the 20 th Century, and is increasingly prevalent worldwide and include the application of patent protection to genetic information and global trade, which with the tendency toward a more open world economy, as proclaimed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the large non- European agrarian exporters, was expected to lead to a gradual abolition of agrarian subsidies.
The birth of industrial agriculture essentially coincides with that of the Industrial Revolution in general.
The identification of nitrogen and phosphorus as critical factors in plant growth led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers, making possible more intensive types of agriculture.
The discovery of vitamins and their role in animal nutrition in the first two decades of the 20th century, led to vitamin supplements, which in the 1920s allowed certain livestock to be raised indoors, reducing their exposure to adverse natural elements.
The discovery of antibiotics and vaccines facilitated raising livestock in larger numbers by reducing disease.
Chemicals developed for use in World War II gave rise to synthetic pesticides. The developments in shipping networks and technology, such as refrigeration, made long-distance distribution of agricultural produce feasible.
Many of the uncertainties that had characterised agriculture diminish, as production circumstances were increasingly controlled and pests seemed ever more controllable. Agriculture moved from risk management toward profit maximization
Agricultural production across the world doubled four times between 1820 and 1975, to feed a global population of one billion people in 1800, and 6.5 billion in 2002. During the same period, the number of people involved in farming fell as the process became more automated.
For example, in the 1930s, 24% of the American population worked in agriculture compared to 1.5% in 2002; in 1940, each farm worker supplied 11 consumers, whereas in 2002, each worker supplied 90 consumers.
In 2000 the 15-member states of the European Union together counted 9 million farms, and agriculture and forestry together employed some 9.5 million people.
Fifty years earlier, in the same countries 20 million farms still employed 30 million people. In Zimbabwe over 80% of the population still rely on agriculture for their livelihood
The number of farms in the US has also decreased, and their ownership is more concentrated. For example, four companies in the US kill 81% of cows, 73% of sheep, 57% of pigs, and produce 50% of chickens. This was cited by the president of the US National Farmers’ Union as an example of “vertical integration”
According to the US National Pork Producers Council, in 1967 there were one million pig farms in America; as of 2002, there were 114,000, with 80 million pigs (out of 95 million) killed each year on what are called ‘factory farms’.
According to the World Watch Institute, 74% of the world’s poultry, 43% of beef and 68% of eggs are produced this way. "Confined animal feeding operations “intensive livestock operations” or “factory farms” can hold large numbers (some up to hundreds of thousands) of animals, often indoors. These animals are typically cows, hogs (pigs), turkeys, or chickens.
Thus, the distinctive characteristics of industrial farms is the concentration of livestock in a given space.
The aim of the operation is to produce as much meat, eggs, or milk at the lowest possible cost – the aim of any businessman, including the farmer in Zimbabwe.
Dr. Tony M. Monda BSc, DVM, is currently conducting veterinary epidemiology, agronomy food security and agro-economic research in zimbabwe. e-mail: tonym.monda@gmail.com
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