WRC water harvesting short course materials get the nod

Abstract

Capacity building It aims to equip rural development fieldworkers and agricultural college graduates with both the technical and the facilitation skills to effectively take water harvesting and conservation technologies and approaches to farmers and home-gardeners. Up to the late 1990s, WH&C was promoted mainly by non-governmental organisations working towards food security through improved gardening and crop-production methods. Trench beds, diversion furrows, swales, mulching and other techniques can be found around South Africa, usually, but not always at a small scale. Although still not widely known, WH&C has also been practiced at an impressive scale by commercial lucerne farmers of the arid Northern Cape who are dependent on thousands of hectares of ‘saaidamme’ or floodwater harvesting basins, to sustain their sheep production and the regional economy. Even with these working systems at all scales and across cultural and income groups, the many different water harvesting and conservation techniques remained on the fringe of mainstream practice and policy until the last decade.

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