Farming in Zambia: The Basics of Turning Bush into Farm Land Using Machinery

Many people staring a farm from scratch in Africa will often find themselves faced with either land that still has lots of trees and shrubs, or with old fields that were cleared by hand and still have tree stumps in them that make tractorised farming difficult. They then have to create fields that are suitable for modern farming that are optimal in size and regular in shape.

Land clearing an be done manually, but our experience at Wintherthorn has proved this to be slow and cumbersome. From the very beginning, we learned the advantages of bringing in earth moving machinery like TLBs and excavators to do heavy lifting (and pushing, and stumping).

This year, our land clearing exercise had three main objectives:
1) to increase the productive land area of our flood plain fields, Florida 1 and Dubai 3
2) carry out some road works
3) clear several new fields in the north of the farm for growing field crops.

TLB stands for tractor loader backhoe. They are versatile, multipurpose pieces of machinery that can be used to dig the earth and load up materials such as rubble and sand.

This video starts with a quick overview of some of the basics of land clearing as we make new fields and optimize old ones. It then looks back at how we increased the size and scope of some of our fields down by the river, and then how we opened the new fields.