Need for well trained personnel on range resources inventory and monitoring for sustainable utilization of grazing lands in Tanzania
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Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Rangeland Society of Tanzania (RST)
Abstract
Continuous extensive cultivation, unplanned conservation
and unguided grazing have resulted to depletion of soil
organic matter, severely threatening soil fertility and
damaging soil structure and thus loss of the ecosystem
ability to produce commodities and values. Therefore,
families are migrating from one place to another to find
fertile soils to grow their crops, and pastures and water for
the livestock. The conservationists increase force to guard
protected areas even those taken from the common
unmanaged grazing lands. In the worst cases, bitter
confrontations have erupted over land use pressure
between migrating pastoralists and crop cultivators and
even between the crop growers, livestock keepers and
conservationists. Several approaches have been sought in
resolving bitter consequences of land use pressure by
relocating farmers and pastoral communities or use force
to bring harmony in case of confrontations but such
approaches cannot repair as quickly as possible the loss of
the ecosystem ability to provide commodities and values to
the poor communities. The bench mark for resolving such chaos over land use pressure is to build capability of the
farmers and pastoral communities on soil and water
conservation so as to improve biomass and at least
increase vegetation cover to about 75 % throughout the
year. This can only be done with well skilled personnel
who can efficiently conduct grazing lands resources
inventory and monitoring and guide the livestock keepers
on sustainable use of these lands. This will increase
vegetation cover and thus rain water infiltration, organic
carbon, improve soil structure, improve biomass and thus
better crop and livestock production. This paper
elaborates the importance of well trained personnel on
efficient range resources inventory and monitoring for
sustainable utilization of the public and private grazing
land areas in Tanzania.
Description
Healthy Rangelands for Sustainable Grazing Land Productivity
Keywords
Benefits of grazing land, grazing land degradation, Livestock-wildlife interaction, Consortium of technical personnel