It sounded like a crazy idea at the time, moving from digital content marketing to growing produce and raising poultry. But the harvest of lessons has been rich and abundant, and a model of what can be achieved by women who are bold enough to enter this fast-growing field
A little over two years ago, I took the road less travelled. I decided to go into farming, specialising in organically grown produce and now chickens, for eggs production. As a youngish black woman, I soon found out that this was not only a novelty, but a crazy field to venture into.
My mom still asks when I’m going back to working a fulltime job in media, since I am a digital content marketer and writer by trade.
But I’ve been fortunate enough to be featured on radio stations, newspapers, magazine and TV shows over the past year, and have stopped being surprised by the intrigue in the story of my business journey.
I now realise that I’m not just a girl who discovered how a backyard she grew up on can be a launchpad for growing my own food, establishing a remarkable small business in tough economic times, and enriching my family with hope for a more sustainable future.
We’re living in a world where the connection between the food we eat and the conversations about land is not always apparent; where the black farmer is still marginalised in the food value chain; and where the pharmaceuticals and medical aid funds are the biggest beneficiaries of the state-funded, chemical-infested food production system.
Black female farmers form a chunk of the farming population, yet suffer the greatest inequalities. Very few women own the land they farm on. I’m not an evangelist, but once I got into agriculture and discovered some truths about food production, I felt it was my duty to be Mother Earth’s disciple and spread the word.
So here’s what I’ve learned in the past couple of years:
- Women are the strongest link
Building this business has shown me why women are not the most dominant players in the business world, let alone in agribusiness. I’ve learned that I have to sacrifice a lot of what I thought were important things for my two sons’ development. I can’t afford for them to take them to Karate and swimming every month, and I’ve had to take them to more reasonably priced private schools, but, I’ve learned that kids need more than ‘things’ to develop into better human beings.
Their extra-mural activity is visiting farms and doing some deliveries to clients or collecting from suppliers. They’ve seen more farms and are learning about business in ways most adults are not enlightened to.
A farmer friend, Leeko Makoene, who runs Made With Rural, an agribusiness that trains and links small-scale farmers to the market, once joked that her kids have had to grow accustomed to sharing space with vegetables in her bakkie. They’ll probably remember this as a foundation for their critical learning about the road to success one day.
- The poorest people are not the hungriest
One of the smartest and most remarkable women I’ve met is, Ma Motha, a farmer from Mpumalanga. She once told me that one of her life’s regrets was that she never got an education. But she raised eight 8 kids and took them all through tertiary with an acre field of land, an ox wagon, and lots of toil to produce seasons of vegetables that her husband would then load on a bakkie and sell to the nearest small town.
She knew all the plants and their medicinal uses and never had a need for medical aid. Even her kids knew what to dig up from the ground, grind and mix to heal themselves. All her kids know how to produce their own food and start a project from beginning to end. That is ingenious and crucial to a reality where the youth are the most unemployed.
The ability to survive and make a living off a patch of land, even a small backyard, or turn a 25-litre bucket of water into an entire day’s supply of cooking, bathing and drinking water is nothing short of remarkable. In this current economic, environmental state, we all could benefit from these lessons.
- Local economies are the future
At a food conference in Sweden, I met a Ugandan female farmer who blew me away with her business acumen and wisdom. I learned that where she comes from, the notion of supermarkets is foreign. The local producers of food, shoes, clothes and pretty much anything you can think of gather at a flea market and sell their wares for a good price. They know each other and know where their food comes from, or from whose field it comes from.
It’s something I’ve come to realise as the most unique and glorious thing about my small and growing business. I can tell my customers where their food comes from, and which small farmer produced it. I can get the food from the farm to the customer while it is so fresh, it could very well still be growing. I have been able to link farmers to the customer in an impactful way. We all need to strive to feed ourselves.
The lessons are endless, and the future is promising. I’ve learned to revel in uncertainty, stretch the limbs of my imagination, and see poetry in everything I do. It’s a true blessing.
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