Why data could be the deciding factor in Africa’s agricultural transformation.

The world has a palm oil problem.
It’s a global, billion-dollar industry and its end result is irreversible environmental damage, ranging from deforestation and fires, to the loss of species such as tigers, pygmy elephants and orangutans.
Palm oil is used in 50% of the products we buy (think bread, shampoo, soaps and even chocolate) due to the fact that it is the highest-yielding vegetable oil crop.
Yet, in a country like Uganda, where 80% of the population is involved in agriculture as a way of life, many Ugandans farm oil palm on small plots, barely making a living.
“The use of data for purposes of precision agricultural systems is being used around the world to optimize farms, from anticipating natural disasters such as droughts and flooding, to predicting the best time to harvest crops, to anticipating outbreaks of pests and disease before they impact the produce,” says AgriSA’s Janse Rabie. “In an era of ever-increasing challenges with respect to ensuring food security, both locally and elsewhere in Africa, the application of data and smart farming practices is becoming ever more important.”
SAP Rural Sourcing Management is a cloud-based system used by Barry Callebaut, among the world’s largest sustainable cocoa producers. But what does fair trade chocolate have to do with Uganda’s problematic, smallholder farm life? And how can data change the palm oil trade so the way in which we farm this much-used resource becomes more ethically-focussed and transparent?
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/05/15/2020-to-2030-will-be-the-decade-of-agri-tech/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: ‘2020 to 2030 Will Be The Decade Of Agri-Tech’</a>
Back in 2009, SAP built a prototype for small-scale farmers across Africa using funding from the German government.
“We spent a long time doing ethnographic research, getting right on the ground with small-scale farmers in West Africa to understand how they live and what challenges are. We wanted to find out what would be useful to them and the cooperatives to which many of us didn&#8217;t belong,” explains Simon Carpenter, SAP Africa’s Chief Technology Advisor.
<div id="attachment_37559" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37559" class="size-medium wp-image-37559" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Simon-Carpenter-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Simon-Carpenter-300x201.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Simon-Carpenter-600x401.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Simon-Carpenter.jpg 640w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Simon Carpenter. Photo provided.</div>
The system was bought by Callebaut so they could provide it to their small-scale (but globally situated) growers as well as the co-ops they deal with – be it cocoa, vanilla or even palm oil micro farmers – a way to collaborate in real-time.
This is where the Kalangala Oil Palm Growers Trust (KOPGT) comes in. The farming collective acts as a hub, connecting smallholder farmers to government services and local agricultural companies. And now, the GIZ – a German development agency that provides services in the field of international development cooperation – is working closely with the Ugandan government to roll out this solution to over 2,000 farmers.
“If we can start to gather data from small-scale farmers on how they farm and where they’re farming, we can do a couple of things: firstly, we can start to build a history and an identity for that small-scale farmer, which makes it easier for either the government or the private sector to extend credit to them so they can start to scale their farms. It also informs government in terms of who is growing what and where which starts to inform future government policy. Do they need agronomists? Are they growing the right crops for their kind of economy? Once you&#8217;ve started to generate this data, you can do some amazing things with it,” adds Carpenter.
<h3>Farming of the future</h3>
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In many instances, lack of information has a direct impact on African smallholder farmers&#8217; outputs and, by effect, livelihoods. According to new research, only 5% of cultivated land in Africa makes use of irrigation compared to 38% in Asia.
Farmers today are experimenting with new processes and production methods. From big data to biotechnology, sensors, drones, autonomous systems and more, the technologies likely to make the most difference in agri-tech are tools and equipment that can capture and interpret data.
Benji Meltzer is the co-founder of Aerobotics, a South African agri-tech startup that has developed an early warning smart scouting platform that could help farmers identify potential pest and disease issues in tree crops. With over 500 farmers already signed up on the platform across 11 countries, they’ve built an end-to-end farm monitoring solution.
<div id="attachment_37558" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37558" class="size-medium wp-image-37558" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-300x300.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-100x100.jpg 100w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-600x600.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-150x150.jpg 150w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer-80x80.jpg 80w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Benji-Meltzer.jpg 1459w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Benji Meltzer. Photo provided.</div>
“As farming conditions become more difficult, farmers have more reason to optimize and farm more precisely. Our data can be used to make more efficient use of resources, including water and chemicals, by applying corrective action in a data-driven manner (rather than blanket application across the farm) and as a result focusing on treatment. Farmers don&#8217;t have tools to effectively manage their resources and farms and are wasting both time and money through inefficiencies. The lack of information, insights and data-driven decisions on the ground can lead to losses and reduced yields,” explains Meltzer.
“We are able to identify individual trees and help growers pinpoint those that are under stress. This means farmers can focus their attention on the areas that matter, and as a result farm by exception and driven by data, rather than by walking blindly through the field,” he says. “We are able to monitor pest and diseases close to real time through our drone imagery (which is processed within a few days) and in-field scouting tools which enables farmers to monitor by exception.”
Aerobotics helps farmers take advantage of a portion of this data by allowing them to drive decisions from using proprietary machine-learning algorithms. What’s interesting is all of their products are currently hosted in the cloud, where they use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale their applications.
“We specifically use AWS for cloud storage (to store raw and processed imagery), cloud compute (to process huge amounts of data and extract insights), database storage and to serve our applications. Working with AWS to help farmers grow healthier crops is a perfect example of the way in which technology transforms traditional industries, leading to better livelihood conditions. Africa can be a harsh environment for farming. Crops are constantly under threat from problems such as disease, pests, and drought. Using the AWS cloud, we are bringing compute, data analytics, and other advanced technologies to help farmers grow healthier crops, despite the harsh conditions.”
Like others, Meltzer believes that cloud has the potential to solve many problems in almost any industry and application. Agriculture is no different, whether it’s irrigation systems, fertilization, or disease and pest control, compute and data analysis capabilities the cloud offers transform these processes to make farming of the future easier.
The use of drone technology, along with data harvesting, has been incredibly effective for South African macadamia growers. At Sutton Crest citrus farm in Mpumalanga in South Africa, for example, they managed to increase nut production with more detailed soil analysis, GPS data and probes.
Macadamia nut trees require different nutrients from one phenological stage to another, so by understanding what to add to fertilizer and when, the farmers can prevent early nut drop – something which lowers overall yield – and save water usage at the same time.
<h3>‘Crowd-farming’ cows?</h3>
From using geo-spatial analysis to farm sugarcane in Swaziland to Fresh Direct, a Nigerian startup which repurposes old shipping containers to grow crops in the densely-populated Abuja capital; to Livestock Wealth’s Ntuthuko Shezi who is “crowd-farming” cows in South Africa as an entry point to the financial services industry, the time is now for African agri-tech.
And it’s far more than self-driving ploughs or robotic tools – the value lies in big data and its applications. MySmartFarm is another locally-developed all-in-one farming tool hosted in the cloud. It analyzes farm data to give real-time insights.
According to a status report from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Africa’s food system requires an agricultural transformation focused on more than just production. It needs to encompass the entire food system. It could explain why, nearly eight years ago, John Deere, the agricultural equipment manufacturer, fitted their tractors with global-positioning-system (GPS) sensors. It seemed revolutionary at the time, but this addition made it possible to stop farmers missing out patches as they shuttled up and down fields or covering the same ground twice – a common problem with an easy solve involving data.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has created standards for ethical and sustainable palm oil production which certifies qualified growers and processors. Currently, around 20% of the palm oil across the globe is certified by RSPO but with smarter farming methods, this number will surely increase.
The farm, like the future, is not what it used to be.
&#8211; Tiana Cline

Farmer-flying-a-Phantom-4-Pro-using-the-Aerobotics-Flight-Planner-app

Big Data And Smart Farmers For Africa’s Agricultural Transformation

Eleven villagers sit under the shade of a marula tree, in the heat of midday, deep in the KwaZulu-Natal bush in a village called Gazini. They have been up since 4AM to tell their stories in search of a small solution to a large problem.
A week before, a herd of elephants trampled through the vegetable patch. Villagers woke to see an elephant in their backyard peering through their door. The backlash has been violent and bloody &#8211; earlier this year, villagers killed an elephant and stripped it to the bone.
Gazini is a scatter of farms two kilometers from the South African border with Mozambique; electricity or cell phone reception is unheard of. The villagers here live hand-to-mouth deep in the bush.
The villagers complain the elephants emerge from the bush in the dead of night, to strike terror into their homes. The reason the elephants roam is because their home in the bush is getting smaller by the year.
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Listening patiently to the villagers are two entrepreneurs, Mmabatho and Desmond Morudi, in white overalls, who believe their business can help the villagers sleep easy.
“The thing that made [the threat] clear to me was when we did a trip along the border fence. There you can see exactly where the fence has been broken and where the elephants cross over. We could see the broken poles snapped in half like twigs,” says Desmond.
The entrepreneurs believe that building 200 beehives, in a two-kilometer barrier will not only fend off the elephants but also make money. The villagers could be forgiven for being sceptical.
“I don’t think they are convinced, it’s still a test to see if it

really, really works to deter the elephants,” says Mmabatho.
“It’s [understandable] why they would believe such a large creature wouldn’t be scared of something so small,” says Desmond.
The Morudis have been working around this village since October. They start work early; the bees get aggressive as the day wears on. The hives hang on wooden poles, 10 meters apart, linked by barbed wire. If touched by an elephant, the hives swing and stir up the bees.
“So far we’ve put up a fence with 40 hives. Two hundred will be the final amount. The challenge is 200 hives is quite a stretch, it means they have to run through other villages of people who don’t even know that the project is going on. There is also the issue of leaving space for cars driving past as well as border patrols. You don’t want to cut the elephants off totally. You just want to cordon off the sensitive areas and leave behind a path.”
The buzzing beehive fence is the brainchild of Lucy King in Kenya, Head of the Human-Elephant Co-Existence Program for Save the Elephants, where she realized that elephants are scared of African honey bees and will avoid beehives at all costs. The bees sting the elephants’ soft skin, eyes, face, trunk and mouth.
The fences have an 80% success rate. They are made from local materials and are cheap, costing $150 to $500 per 100 meters, says King from her headquarters Nairobi.
The beehive fences have been so successful with human-elephant conflict (HEC), 13 countries have adopted similar projects, one of them being the Morudi’s growing business, The Village Market.
“We’ve obsessed over [King’s] manual and her work in Kenya… At the same time we were trying to find villages that we could work with. We had the skills, we had the knowledge, we needed the natural vegetation,” says Mmabatho.
In the shade of the marula tree, they have taken King’s research one step further. They want to use beehive fences as part of a R2.5-million ($180,000) dream to harvest, bottle and deliver wild, high-quality honey to suburban shopping aisles.
“In general our jars sell for R55 per 375g. Then we have Mmabatho’s baby, the raw high quality, for R75 per 375g. We aim to develop a luxury brand, bringing more orders to a premium market. We work on 35kgs per hive per harvest, which is once every three months,” says Desmond.
This means, by January, 11 bee keepers of Gazini could have yielded R49,000 ($3,500).
It’s been a long journey to this odd business for Desmond and Mmabatho. They come from modest homes in Kimberly and Pretoria.
“Our desire was to develop communities we grew up in, providing help for people and business opportunities.”
The idea was born in the home of Mmabatho’s grandfather in Winterveld, a rural town 68 kilometers northwest of Pretoria, in 2012.
“Bees would get into our ceiling and produce so much honey that the ceiling would cave in. Like every other family, we would try and smoke them out and kill them. But they would always come back,” says Mmabatho.
Instead her grandfather took the family on a beekeeping course and Mmabatho was hooked. She started her own company called Iliju Bee Farm.
Her work with Iliju Bee Farm led to Mmabatho shaking hands with ministers and members of the top 100 entrepreneurs of Europe. She also dined with Richard Branson. In 2013, Mmabatho was selected as one of the brightest young minds in South Africa, and again as one of the emerging changemakers by Spark International.
Things got even busier and Mmabatho’s husband, Desmond, left the comfort of corporate accounting to help manage the business. But success proved to be a devil in disguise. The business grew too quickly and couldn’t cope. They took on a bee expert who left a year and a half later and Iliju collapsed.
Then they started The Village Market at the end of 2014.
“As we learned more about bees, and their plight, that’s when it all came together. Lucy King’s study came after we had established Winterveld. Nora Taiga, of the Peace Foundation, now Elephant, Rhinos &amp; People (ERP), paid Mmabatho a subsistence salary of R10,000, then introduced us to the people of Gazini,” says Desmond.
“At the beginning of the year the crossings were getting quite significant. Previously it had just been bulls, but then we started seeing breeding herds coming through,” says Nonceba Lushaba, KZN Coordinator of ERP.
“From the elephant’s point of view they have realized that there are easy pickings here. It’s kind of like a naughty child who goes to pick sweets.”
In Gazini, finding the bees is half the battle. Once the hives are built, the beekeepers take the hives to their homes in Gazini and attempt to colonize them.
Bees are fussy dwellers; they need water, plenty of flowering plants, protective vegetation and far from direct sunlight. Once the bees have moved in, the keepers close the entrances at night and then transport the colony to the beehive fence. Work starts before dawn. In their bee suits they walk with the hives on their heads to this farm. It is so remote you need a 4&#215;4 to navigate a maze of bush trails to find it.
“Another important issue is researching bee diseases. Bee health is important if we want to conserve them. Research needs to keep track of these growing issues.”
Threats, like the varroa mite that attacks bees in the hive and contributes in part to colony collapse, are global concerns. This is why the couple have teamed up with the University of Pretoria (Tuks) Zoology and Entomology department’s Bee Group that will add valuable research to elephant behavior, bee repopulation and disease control.
Even though US and Europe honey bee colonies were under threat from Colony Collapse Disorder for almost ten years, the African honey bee  was safe from the impact of industrialized apiculture. This according to research by Robin Crew,  professor of Entomology and leader of the Social Insects Research Group in the University of Pretoria’s Department of Zoology and Entomology.
In Crew’s book “A World Without Bees”, the fact that Africa has the largest number of wild honey bee swarms in the world has contributed to wider genetic diversity and therefore populations are not as severely affected by diseases.
The beepocolypse, as it was called, could even be resolved with recolonization with the African honey bee because of its resilience.
Their Gazini project has even caught the eye of the African Union which granted $15,000 to the bee research at Tuks.
“It’s not just the sake of doing research for the sake of research, but using it to solve community problems. To help developed communities,” says Desmond.
On the morning of inspection, Mmabatho finds suspicious larvae in one of the hives. It turns out to be waxworm. These pests eat cocoons, pollen, the shed skins of bees, and chew through beeswax.
“We need the bees to focus all their energy on making the honey. As soon as invaders enter the hive they expend all their energy getting it out, which of course affects production,” says Desmond.
The couple believe that deforestation, pesticides and insecticides also affect the bees. They instead plant strong smelling plants and herbs, like spring onions, to discourage pests and also plant flowering vegetables like tomatoes to encourage pollination.
“We are trying to encourage our farmers to use organic methods so they don’t affect the bee populations. That is why, in addition to this, we sell veggies to markets,” says Mmabatho.
Once the honey is ready it its transported 600 kilometers to their bottling plant at the Riversands Incubation Hub that opened in September in Fourways, north of Johannesburg.
“The problem we have with honey in South Africa is a lot of it is imported. Because of important laws we need to irradiate it. You will see in the shops it will say it’s ionized by radiation in order to increase shelf life. The impact of that is that it takes away the good qualities from the honey.”
“There is also a lack of variation of honey in the market. We introduce some product differentiation;  infusing honey with lemon or cinnamon.”
Raw honey is murky and beige in color, a completely different experience from what you see in the shops.
“People are used to seeing this brown liquid here on the shelves that’s what they associate with honey. They don’t appreciate the real raw product will crystallize,” says Mmabatho.
Honey also can be used in health and beauty products and is a natural anti-inflammatory. Scrubs, moisturizers and masks can all be made from the by-product of the comb.
This is one business that is helping a tiny village sleep at night and got a couple of bright African entrepreneurs buzzing.

The Stings That  Make Elephants Fly

It started 20 years ago, when farmers from a small seaside town in Africa took a sea snail slithering through the swaying kelp forests under the ocean and tried to farm it inland. They grew this small-town idea into a thriving $35.3-million aquaculture business. This is the story of abalone in Africa, reared on the shores of Hermanus, 120 kilometers southeast of Cape Town, which ends up on dinner plates in Hong Kong.
“We are lucky our species has got a very good taste, a very good texture. Our processing techniques are of a very high standard and we are able to compete with the best.”
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So says Werner Piek, Executive Marketing Manager of Abagold, a man who grew up eating abalone long before it was farmed in Africa.
“I knew abalone since I was very small. We had a holiday house in Franskraal, just past Gansbaai. In those days there were no wetsuits, or flippers or anything like that. You had your pair of old tekkies (trainers), goggles and a screwdriver and you would go diving. In those days we were allowed to take five abalone per day. Nice big ones. On Saturdays we would go diving and bring back the abalone and cook it in a poitjie [slow cooked stew]. That was our weekend.”
In years of jet-setting between Hong Kong and South Africa, the 50-year-old Piek has adjusted his palate. Nowadays the man who started working as a factory manager in 2006, when abalone began to boom, prefers dried abalone, cooked with Asian flair.
“That’s a South African style of doing [abalone]. Asians have a very different way of eating it. It has to be whole abalone. They don’t like it minced. It’s cooked with a Chinese-style sauce, served with a piece of broccoli. They are looking for the toughness and the chewiness. South Africans want seafood with garlic butter.”
Like a good wine, abalone is as a varied as the grape. With over 100 species, of which 15 are commercial, abalone has different characteristics.
“What is the price of red wine? It depends, you have the pairing; where it comes from; what the taste and texture was; and the method it was made. From a world perspective French wine is considered the best, with abalone – its Japanese. It has the longest history of export to our main market. South Africa has been in the business for 50 years, but we have only been farming abalone for the last 15 to 20 years,” says Piek.
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Abalone is eaten during Chinese New Year or during the Dragon Boat Festival. It is a high-end product, used as a symbol of wealth. It isn’t, despite what people believe, an aphrodisiac.
“It is a famous gift is to give your potential mother-in-law, as a gift on Mother’s Day, to show respect. So it’s definitely not an aphrodisiac, no one wants to give their mother-in-law that kind of a present,” says Piek.
There is plenty of room to grow. The South African abalone farms account for 1% of the 120,000 tons of abalone produced in the world.
“You can’t go to Hong Kong and miss it. The branding is everywhere, on taxis, on billboards and on buildings. With all my experience I prefer the very high-end dried abalone. It produces all the flavor of the abalone. It’s not easy to prepare, it takes three to four days to cook it,” says Piek.
From the 1950s, the abalone industry went global and Hermanus was right in there; all because of canning technology making export into Asia easier.
At the time, South African commercial divers were hauling 2,000 tons per year from the seabed. Authorities realized this wasn’t going to last and introduced something called total allowable catches (TAC), restricting catches to 600 tons by 1970.
“1994 was at that stage that poaching started to pick up in South Africa. The policing around the coast became a lot more lax. People felt more freedom and felt they could take out of the sea, whereas before the police would do horrible things to them if they were caught. Also around that period, South Africa became a lot more international and the Chinese who came saw that there was abalone.”
The doors to China were open and the small-time abalone pickers tried their hands at farming. The latest data released in the Aquaculture Yearbook 2014, by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, showed businesses in the seas were on the rise. In 2013, the value of the aquaculture sector, based on sales of products, grew by 38.1% to $46.5 million. Abalone accounted for $35.3 million.
A drop in the ocean when compared with South Africa’s gross value of agricultural production which was almost $12.5 billion in 2013.
Gavin Johnston, head of Aquaculture Consulting and Management Services, who has built aquafarms over the last 20 years, says that abalone is one of Africa’s great success stories.
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“Abalone is a niche within a niche. It’s the high-end of society that wants our species. There is lots of different species. The market is complex. The price can fluctuate by as much as 200 percent depending on how it was dried and its slight color differences. Guys are paying $400 a kilogram.”
“It’s an interesting market, with a capacity of 80,000 tons a year. [South Africa is] currently producing 1,200 tons. We are a small fry that supplies a small portion, but it’s got a high value on the market. It’s going to be interesting to see when we there are more farms on the market,” says Johnston.
The small crustacean in the kelp forest is going to become an even bigger money maker as the years go on. Piek expects that by 2020 South Africa will produce 3,000 tons a year. It seems the dinner plates of Hong Kong can’t get enough.

The Sea Snail Business That’s Worth  $35 Million

Four years of drought and South Africa is counting the costs on the farms. It is tougher than most for hundreds of struggling sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal who lost everything last year and fear the same this year.
Fifty-year-old Thembelihle Mzila grew up near Wartburg, 40 kilometers from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. All she wanted, like her parents, was to own a sugarcane field. For more than 20 years, she has lived that dream. All these years, Mzila has worked long hours to feed her children and has build her house.
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“I have learned to use my own hands at a young age. I know how to use my hands, it is something I was born into, I never begged,” says Mzila, pointing to her sugarcane field stretching downhill near her homestead. When FORBES AFRICA met Mzila, the sky over the rural town of Wartburg was grey and the clouds were heavy. It rained when we left but not enough to make up for the four years of drought.
Mzila’s childhood dream is slowly running dry. Since drought struck a few years ago, there is little to harvest, forcing Mzila to look for other income while she prays for rain. Last year, KwaZulu-Natal was the first of five provinces declared drought disaster areas by the government. Early this year, the government announced a R15-billion ($955 million) bailout through loans, but Mzila and her 95 associates won’t qualify for it. They don’t have collateral. While she waits for rain, she is selling soft drinks and snacks to keep her children at school.
Mzila is the chairperson of the Inzwakele Co-operative Group, formed in 2011, that meets once a month. There are 95 members, who plough a field the size of a football field. Most are pensioners, unemployed and single parents. Besides solely depending on rain for ploughing, there are many other problems. They use their annual financial support from government to hire agricultural instruments and repair fences broken down by cattle.
It takes up to two years for a sugarcane harvest. Many are despondent as well as dry.
“Because of climate change, and its unpredictable weather, we find it difficult now to know exactly which months are good for ploughing the fields. Habitually we start in August and through to the end of January, but there was no rain last year, as a result the fields dried up and went hungry with no money,” says Mzila.
“Unemployment is very high here. Many people turn to farming for income. Though we have so many members, we still have a challenge to assist each and every one getting started with their own fields. We have many in the waiting list because we hire tractors and tools. We have a roster that we keep,” says Bongani Shangase, a 75-year-old former bus driver who now farms sugarcane.
<div id="attachment_4748" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4748" class="size-medium wp-image-4748" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/P26B8333-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Young children collect water from a spring in Kimaswa Western Kenya Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015. 375 schools in Cheptai and throughout Western Kenya are currently being given Lifestraw Water Filters to ensure that every child at school has clean water to drink. Jaguar Landrover are supporting the project being run in partnership with Vestergaard and Climate Care and employees form Jaguar Landrover are currently visiting the schools to assist with distribution. ( Photo/KATE HOLT)</div>
“As the small cooperation farmers, we get advice or recommendation from the ‘mill’ as to what kind of sugarcane seed we should be planting at the given time. Based on the soil test done by Illovo representatives on our land, we were given sugarcane N12 and N48 seed to plant. Those of us who ploughed in 2012 have started selling sugarcane to Illovo.”
Mfanufikile Mbatha, 52, is another member who has yet to see his first crop. He’s a shopkeeper as well.
“We worked separately on our own gardens, ploughing vegetables for ourselves and selling when the product was good. But when the local officials approached us to organize ourselves, we came up with the cooperation in 2012. The thing that boosted our confidence was the government grant, although at times we received money a little late into the ploughing season, we are grateful for it,” he says.
They’d be even more grateful for a few weeks of torrential rain.

Dry And Desperate

<h3>Claire Reid, 29 
Founder, Reel Gardening</h3>
South Africa is experiencing the worst drought since 1982, leaving farmers in debt worth billions of rands. Could Claire Reid’s gardening solutions be the answer?
Reid discovered her “revolutionary planting method” at the age of 16 when trying to earn pocket money growing a vegetable garden and selling the crop to her parents. That’s when she realized gardening was no child’s play.
“I would put more seed than necessary, I didn’t know how far apart or how deep it was. The whole thing was frustrating,” she recalls.
Frustration gave way to fortune. Her teacher encouraged her to enter a competition simplifying gardening, based on marking small areas of ground with biodegradable color-coded paper strips encasing organic fertilizer and seeds at the correct depth and distance. The paper helped save up to 80% of water. The project won her a gold medal.
The Department of Water Affairs sent Reid to Stockholm, where she became the first South African to win an international award, beating 28 other countries.
“All of a sudden I was being sent overseas to represent South Africa and being given an award by Thabo Mbeki [former South African president]. It was quite a whirlwind time being nominated for Checkers Woman of the Year while I was only 17.”
Reid studied Architecture, Geology and Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria. While on internship, she landed a project with Anglo American that took her to Marikana, an area that needed her gardening skills. She pitched the idea to Anglo American that gave her a start-up loan to form her company Reel Gardening in 2010. A social enterprise that employs 10 mothers from diverse backgrounds, it has been rolled out in 280 schools. Though its focus is online, new mom Reid has recently set up operations in Kenya. The company has sold products in the UK and plans to expand to the UAE, Japan, South Korea, Canada and the US. In November last year, she also made it to BBC’s 30Under30 list.
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Milenials_Jay-Caboz-reid

The millennials

South African farmers have a tough choice, they either have to sell their cows or watch them die, as the country suffers the worst drought in 23 years.
In this dry world, more than 800,000 livestock are under threat from thirst and hunger.
Gerhard Schutte, the CEO of Red Meat Producers’ Organisation, says 30,000 commercial farmers, 250,000 emerging farmers and 1.2 million households owning livestock are feeling it.
“In the emerging sector [the farmers] have lost up to R1.35 billion ($96.9 million) while in the commercial sector its R3 billion ($215 million),” says Schutte.
“In the case of emerging farmers and households owning livestock, there are no means to buy in feed, so the scenario is bleak. Commercial farmers can still buy in feed but availability is a problem.”
In the KwaZulu-Natal province alone, along the east coast of South Africa, more than 40,000 cattle have died.
“A lot of livestock have been lost by farmers. In our farm at Brakspruit, in Utrecht, alone we have lost thousands of livestock. If this crisis continues, we are likely to lose more than 800,000,” says Mandla Buthelezi, Vice-President of the National African Farmers Union.
Molemi Modise, from South Africa’s North West province, has been a farmer for 25 years and says this is the worst drought ever.
“The last time we had decent rain was five years ago and you can imagine how the farm is looking like now. I spent every cent I had to sustain my livestock.”
“There is no grass left and I have already spent more than I should. I visited other farmers at Molatedi Dam and saw carcases everywhere. Some cattle collapsed lying alongside the dam. The situation has gone beyond worse. The unfortunate part is that rain is not going to help anything now. We are a few months before winter and no grass will mature between now and then.”
“If I don’t get help in the near future, I will lose my stock, which would be unfortunate and that could mean my entire farm workers will lose their jobs and their families will suffer. The situation is very bad. I am improvising to keep my head above water,” says Modise.
Like many farmers in the country, Modise appeals to the government to help with the drought.
“This situation calls for help from the government because if we don’t get any soon the country will be heading for a major disaster.”
According to climatologist Simon Gear, the drought is the result of the EL Nino, warm and dry weather conditions, which occur every two and a half years.
“It’s a regular cycle but this one is the warmest. It’s at its peak and would probably decline towards the end of the summer season,” says Gear.
What is clear is that breeding herds are likely to get smaller. Schutte says it could take three to four seasons to recover.

Livestock Doomed To Die

It’s a hard life for farmers who have lived for generations in the Karoo, South Africa’s vast expanse of nothing. Every day, they fight cutting winds and soaring temperatures in bone-dry valleys to nurture their stock. To the visitor, the Karoo is a barren place between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Here the communities are small, Twitter is scarce and there are more goats than people. Soon there could be more rumbling trucks than goats.
This is all because of a mining method called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It’s been hailed a savior of the United States (US) economy, during the 2008 recession, making it one of the largest producers of natural gas in the world. It is now on its way to South Africa, because the government and oil and gas companies believe, beneath the Karoo, lies an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas; enough to fuel the country’s economy for up to 20-30 years. It could also bring $100 billion and thousands of jobs.
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For some, like Harry Memese, who grew up in the small town of Graaff Reinet, in the heart of the Karoo, the sound of thousands of trucks full of gas grinding along the highways could be music to his ears.
“I have worked as a petrol cashier for eight years, there is no job other than that in Graaff Reinet. The people are suffering. There are 30 youths here where I live, and only two of them are working in my street. Fracking is going to help the people get jobs. If you look around our townships, like here in Graaff Reinet, and the rest of the Eastern Cape, people are not working. Fracking is supposed to bring in 300,000 more jobs. At least there is something that people can earn earn,” says the 33-year-old.
Grey hair, from a life harder than the land he grew up in, makes Memese look older than he is. His life is a struggle and the $420-a-month he earns is barely enough to feed his wife, children and younger brother. The promise of fracking could mean a new lease of life for his family. He dreams of seeing his 19-year-old brother Ayanda one day qualifying as an electrical engineer on a fracking well.
No one really knows how much shale gas is in the Karoo. When estimates emerged in 2010, Econometrix, South Africa’s largest independent macro-economic consulting firm, believed there was 485 tcf, enough to make South Africa the fifth largest producer in the world.
But these days the figure has been downsized. Another task team set by the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), in September 2012, spearheaded by the Petroleum Oil and Gas Corporation of South Africa (PetroSA), believes there is a mere 30 tcf.
No matter the figure, companies want to explore. Shell, the largest bidder in the Karoo, wants to frack 90,000 square kilometers &#8211; the size of Sierra Leone.
“It’s a potential resource. It certainly can be a big player. Scientists initially thought it was 485 tcf but the latest from the same people is 370 tcf. If you listen to petroleum companies, it could be fractions of that. To put things into scale, PetroSA has been running on 1 tcf for their gas to liquid plant in Mossel Bay. The challenging thing for South Africa is the environmental impact and the regulations,” says Chris Bredenhann, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ oil and gas advisory leader in Africa.
Bredenhann thinks natural gas may have captured investor interest, but Africa has its challenges. In his company’s 2014 Africa oil and gas review, companies operating in Africa face fraud, corruption, theft, poor infrastructure and a lack of skills. Investors are also concerned about regulatory uncertainty.
“Some key players have delayed or canceled projects until further clarity can be sought in their respective jurisdictions as they cannot move forward with doubts given the long-term nature of the needed investments,” says Bredenhann.
According to the report, Africa has proven natural gas reserves of 502 tcf, with 90% of the continent’s annual production of 6.5 tcf coming from Nigeria, Libya, Algeria and Egypt. China has an estimated 1,115 tcf, the largest supply of shale gas. With African countries like Mozambique looking to exploit reserves, the competition for sales and investment is tough.
“There is also the fact there is tight international competition. Asia, who is the main consumer of gas, is being fed by the United States and the likes of Australia who managed to set up their operations far faster than expected. It means companies operating out of Tanzania and Mozambique, who have met various delays in operations, will lose out as the price decreases in a competitive market,” says Bredenhann.
Falling prices could spell disaster for the up-and-coming countries looking to sell their surplus gas.
“The sentiment of Africa being open is applicable to South Africa. Total, Chevron and Shell have made investments offshore. If you had this conversation five years ago this would have been a different conversation,” says Bredenhann.
The only certainty for those who want to frack, is that they have a fight on their hands.
<h3>Rallying The Cheques</h3>
In a year, the fighting fund for farmers in the Karoo has swollen. 
A sure sign that the gloves are off.
Like his fellow 3,000 farmers, Dickie Ogilvie won’t let fracking vie without a fight. Ogilvie gave up teaching to help his wife, Colleen, take over her brother’s farm, Doorndraai, 100 kilometers south west of Graaff Reinet. His fears have led him to pledge R3 for every hectare on his 14,000 hectare farm to fight fracking in court. Most farmers across the Karoo are as trenchant as him.
“Some guys have given a lump sum payment. Most of the other moneys are per hectare basis, the pledge varies from R1 a hectare to R10 ($1), depending how strongly a farmer feels.  There is a lot of money to fight this if it goes to litigation process. Farmers have realized now how serious this can be,” says Ogilvie.
“Our resolution from the Aberdeen district is dire. I don’t believe they understand that if something goes wrong the Karoo is finished. You cannot rectify the water contamination, once it’s been contaminated it’s over, we will have to move off. It’s not only farms; the towns rely on underground water. My small little family can make a plan, but we are talking about whole communities in towns. It’s a huge problem, no answers are given, there is so much uncertainty.”
The fierce litigation between big business and the Karoo’s landowners has been brewing since 2009, when fracking explorations were stopped to allow for regulations. Landowners locked horns with government over the lack of consultation and what they call flawed laws and uninformed environmental assessments.
Their lobbying has seen some results, says Derek Light, the small-town lawyer from Graaff Reinet. The small offices he works in have been consumed by fracking for three years. Light even took a cell phone when he went for hip surgery so he wouldn’t miss anything. He represents hundreds of landowners, including millionaire Johann Rupert, the second richest man in Africa, who lives around the corner.
In September, four years after the first applications were submitted, baseline water testing began. The study, researched by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and financed by the Eastern Cape provincial government, looks at the Karoo’s underground water system.
“Baseline testing is not done overnight, it’s a long process that takes two to three years. The timing of it has been poor, and it is something the oil companies should have done in their environmental management plan process, which they failed to do. It’s now being done by the taxpayer. The government should have had this information at their disposal when they first made their decisions on the whole process,” says Light.
He adds that the government jumped the gun. Drafts, issued in 2013, were flawed and focused on regulating fracking while forgetting about the mining operations around it, says Light.
“Drilling in South Africa is not regulated at all. Shell and other companies feed off the fact that there are few documented cases of contamination from the actual fracking process. Because the wealth of contamination comes from the other process, you can’t divorce the one from the other.”
Another loud and stringent voice against fracking is that of Jonathan Deal, CEO of Treasure Karoo Action Group (TKAG). Strangely enough, he didn’t know about fracking until he read a news article in 2011 when Rupert was speaking out against it.
“I began to investigate and attended the Shell public meetings. It was very clear to me that Shell was trying to control the meetings. There was a very specific aim in those meetings and it wasn’t to tell the truth as far as I was concerned,” says Deal.
From his 40,000-hectare Eco-farm near Montagu, in the Karoo, Deal has been calling on the Presidency, the Public Protector and gas companies to revise their actions before fracking takes place. He’s not alone; Julius Kleynhans, the Head of Environmental Affairs at the NGO AfriForum, has declared it will back TKAG financially should it go
to court.
“It is the balance of convenience. If companies and the state have invested enormous amounts of money and the public sits and watches what happens and wait for everything to be built and then goes and complains. It’s very difficult for a court to literally throw its investments away.”
“If something goes wrong with a fracking well ten years later and those chemicals migrate 30 kilometers away, even if a farmer ends up with polluted water, what chance has he got of proving that it was from that well&#8230; if people get sick from air and water pollution, like what is being happening in the United States, who is going to pay for it? The state is; the people who pay tax. Not the companies that have shut down their operations when they have moved on somewhere else,” says Deal.
It’s not just a Karoo problem, says Deal.
“If fracking starts in this country and the gas reserves are there. We will see the technology of fracking march across this country just like it did in the United States. Geologically speaking the Karoo basin is where the gas bearing shale is thought to reside, and that extends into Gauteng and parts of Mpumalanga. In fact it extends out of the northern borders of South Africa.”
Despite plans to halt explorations until proper research is completed, the government remains adamant it will go ahead and be a game changer.
“New regulations should be released in September, but we don’t yet know what they contain. All of this has happened without consultation. It seems what will happen are inadequate regulations will be passed, with inadequate consultation. We are then faced with serious decisions where we go from there. If the regulations are unlawful, that may have to be challenged in the Constitutional Court. It seems, from the ministers announcements, hot off the heels of the new regulations will be the issuing of licenses which seems to indicate government has already taken a decision on those, which should not be granted because they don’t comply with the new laws,” says Light.
The impact of exploration could be catastrophic, says Deal, especially since companies refuse to disclose the chemical composition of the additives. Chemical additives make up 1% of the 20 million liters used for a well. On one pad there can be 32 wells.
“With exploration, the same risks are there, they have to frack to see if it’s there. Don’t come to this country and look for secrecy privileges. Don’t come and try hide behind commercial interests to hide the mix of chemicals, this is not America,” says Deal.
“The minute these licenses are issued, these corporates are going to carry on with what they want to do anyway. It’s going to be challenged. People are well aware of it. The minute those licenses are issued, they will be challenged,” says Ogilvie.
Landowners seem to be putting their money where their mouth is. One wonders what people across Africa, who don’t have money will do.
<h3>What’s The Problem?</h3>
Independent geologist, Wlady Altermann, believes fracking fears are full of hot air.
Imagine a rock with thousands of pockets. Then imagine you have to drill, thousands of times, to release the gas from these pockets. This is what the Karoo looks like underground and the amount of drilling needed could make fracking costly, says Wlady Altermann, a geologist at the University of Pretoria.
“All the knowledge of these compartments and the distribution of pockets are very poor. [The Karoo] would require a very good geophysical investigation. After that, the drill hole positions need to be drilled to investigate the properties of the rock, the stability of the composition and the wealth of the gas. Only after that, can a decision be made as to the wealth of the shale gas,” says Altermann.
The German- born professor knows a thing or two about rocks. Apart from studying them since he was a child, Altermann spent years studying rocks from Mars. Space travel was out of the question so Altermann flew across the globe and has been studying mineral deposits in South Africa since the 1980s.
Altermann, now the Kumba-Exxaro Chair in Geodynamics of Ore Deposits at the university, believes that fracking is harmless if it’s done properly.
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“The misconceptions are basically based on poor information. It comes from the direct comparison with the United States, which I think is not comparable. Secondly, it comes from the perceptions that the surface and the shallow subsurface have something to do with shale gas deposits. Shale gas deposits are much deeper.”
“The fracking itself is such a tiny part of the entire process. It’s not the dangerous part of the process. The dangerous part of the process is the later methods of production. Fracking itself, I think, it’s the wrong discussion,” says Altermann.
Water contamination by drilling through the Karoo’s aquifers, 300 meters below the surface, is also unlikely says Altermann, because the distance between the underground water and the shale gas is far.
“The shale in the United States is at much shallower levels. Between 1,000-1,500 meters. The deeper you go, the less the risk of contamination. The pressure in the ceiling holds the gas better. The chance to contaminate groundwater through that type of production is so low; you really must act like an idiot to do this. It’s not impossible but if it’s done properly, there’s no problem,” he says.
The fracking process has made significant technological steps since it began 70 years ago, says Altermann. Wells can be spaced further apart because drilling horizontally can stretch for 5 kilometers. Ten years ago, that same reach was a kilometer.
The risk lies with the waste after fracking. Companies in the US have been guilty of reusing this water to save costs, instead of disposing of it.
“This is what causes most of the problems. In other countries, it is forbidden, there are environmental laws. That should be avoided in South Africa as well, controlled in a way that you can be sure nothing happens,”
says Altermann.
Natural gas is a greener fossil fuel than coal, says Altermann.
“South Africa’s energy demand is expected to increase by 60% up to 2050. Coal cannot supply it; if coal supplied it we would sit in darkness and not see our beautiful sunsets under the African sun. At today’s state of technology, the best way to mitigate climate change and CO2 emissions, the cheapest thing technically is to switch from coal to gas combustion. It reduces CO2 emissions by 50%. It’s a much more effective way of producing energy,”
says Altermann.
“People talk about fracking and groundwater; no one realizes that actually in many areas where groundwater is scarce, where there is not enough water to supply the population, fracking is used to extract groundwater. They frack the rocks, the aquifer, without chemicals with just water and sand and crack the rocks, so that water can flow out the cracks easier. It is used by many countries especially in sub-Saharan Africa.”
According to the professor, fracking could change the face of South Africa and not cause too much worry.
<h3>Last Gasp For Eden</h3>
It’s a small corner of the Karoo: a corridor of private land that stretches 300,000 hectares from the Camdeboo National Park, in Graaff Reinet, east to the Mountain Zebra National Park. It took 66 farmers over three years to buy into this project that promises a Garden of Eden teeming with wildlife. It could become known as the last piece of untouched land in the Karoo if fracking begins.
“The first meeting in Graaff Reinet was a little tense. I think a lot of the landowners thought we were going to attempt a big land purchase and buy out hundreds of thousands of hectares. Also, I think they were a bit worried that we were going to tell them what they had to do on their own land. Once this was clarified, there was little problem,” says Matthew Norval, the Director of the Conservation Programme at the Wilderness Foundation.
The corridor project is the brainchild of Norval, in collaboration with South Africa National Parks (SANParks). He wants to create a reserve for future generations.
“The farmers in this area have looked after the land for many generations, some of them are third and fourth generation. The reason you can build a natural corridor in that region is because the land has been so well looked after and is still in good condition and there is a strong affinity from the farmers who own that land,” says Norval.
The application is with the Minister of Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa.
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“Fracking raised its head at almost the same time we started working in that area. There is no doubt that it influenced the way we worked and the way some of the landowners decided how to collaborate with us. I think fracking hit a lot of the landowners, sort of right between the eyes. They suddenly realized that properties that had been in their families for generations were now under threat. It was possible their land would get damaged and their children or their children’s children wouldn’t be able to make a livelihood from farming. You have to bear in mind its prime natural rangeland grazing for sheep and cattle,” says Norval.
“I think it would be near impossible to rehabilitate the Karoo after fracking. In some areas, to a layman it may look like gravel plain. Somebody that doesn’t understand the intricacies of that ecosystem might just assume you can level it and there you go. But it’s not like that.”
“This is our last gasp. Never mind rhino, we’re losing lion; we’re losing pangolin by the ton. When it comes to land, the opportunity to build corridors and create landscapes that are going to have some relevance in the future, this is our last chance. ”
Over to the minister.

I Want A  Fracking Future

When you walk in a maize field in Solwezi, Zambia, it’s difficult to tell where the wilderness ends and the crops begin; you could get lost in the canopy of weeds choking the corn. Lifetimes are spent bending and sweating to coax the crops from this dusty land. There is not much maize to show for it. The farmers of Solwezi often struggle.
A man who walks through these fields every day wants to change all this. Guy Hammond is an unusual face to find in Solwezi. What’s more unusual is Hammond is here to tell farmers to forget plough and fertilizer; a bit like telling a bird to forget the sky.
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Hammond fits the part of a farmer from Africa. His khaki shirt is a shade lighter than his pants. White socks peek from his worn black leather boots. His skin is as tanned as the leather.
It’s even stranger to hear how he landed up in Zambia. Hammond is part of Africa’s wandering tribe of Zimbabwean farmers. He grew tobacco in Zimbabwe until he lost his farm to the government in 2002. Forced out, he moved to the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo for First Quantum Minerals as a shift supervisor. His path led him to Solwezi, one of the fastest growing towns in Africa, once a tiny village on the northern borders of Zambia and 16 kilometers from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now Hammond works for Kansanshi mine, run by First Quantum Minerals, teaching farmers to abandon the way of farming he was taught as a child. It’s called conservation farming and Hammond wants to change the ways Zambians farm.
“We are now going into our fifth season. The program has taken local average yields from just over one ton per hectare to four tons per hectare. But some of the best farmers on our scheme have consistent yields of about eight tons per hectare,” says Hammond.
It’s an eye-opening experience to walk through crops surrounded by knee-high grass, an acacia tree and an anthill the size of a house. The two fields side by side tell a story.  On the one side Hammond has a conservation crop; the other he’s planted with fertilizer.  The conservation side is as big as the anthill whereas the fertilizer isn’t.
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“In the nineties, Brian Oldreive, a farmer in Zimbabwe, came to believe that modern farming was the root of the problem. He was working on a farm that was failing. Crop yields were poor. No one could work out why the soil was losing its qualities. But the family was buying more and more fertilizer and spending millions on expensive machinery,” he says.
Oldreive, being a religious man, turned failing land into bountiful fields like something out of the bible. What’s more he did it without fertilizer or a plough. Instead, he covered the seeds with mulch made from dried grass and waited for the rains; the way God intended, says Hammond.
“I knew of Oldreive when I was farming as he was writing a lot of [then] controversial articles in the various agriculture magazines about this new method of farming. Everybody thought he was mad. I never learned conservation farming as a child in Zimbabwe. I only learned it in 2009 when I attended Brian’s conservation farming course in Harare after having farmed conventionally for 14 years. I was converted in three days,” says Hammond.
“Oldreive looked back in history and found that modern farming as we know it is a man-made disaster. He found that the plough was the chief culprit. The plough basically inverts the soil, all the organisms that work in the soil on the top, which are anabolic and does all your compost decay and eating of the leaves, and then you are burying them and killing them. And those organisms that are under the soil are being exposed to sunlight and oxygen,” he says.
Oldreive doubled his yield and cut his production costs by 66%. Now this has been brought to Solwezi, says Hammond.
“Conservation farming has taken off like a rocket. People are taking a look at their friend’s crops on the program and asking ‘how the hell did your get your crops so beautiful?’ We now have 1,800 farmers on the program,” says Bruce Lewis, the head of CSR at Kansanshi.
Hammond also wants Zambian farmers to abandon slash and burn farming, which is burning fields to clear crops for the next year’s growth. It damages the soil and worsens global warming.
“Every year, one billion hectares of Africa goes up in smoke. We are also contributing in our own way in Africa to global warming. It’s not just China and industrialized nations that smog our atmosphere, it’s actually the peasant who has been doing what he has been doing for thousands of years,” says Hammond.
Traditionally, across Africa, inputs are notoriously late. The Zambian government delivered its fertilizer to farmers in February, 90 days late. For a farmer this spells disaster.
“Maize is a 110-day crop so you’ve missed a whole season by delivering fertilizer in February; it’s a waste of money. The whole idea is to teach farmers to farm without using farming inputs. That’s the most expensive thing and the thing that cuts the most profit out… With conservation farming, the only input cost is the seed itself… This is why these schemes fail. With all the best intentions, it’s just poor delivery that costs the government millions,” says Hammond.
It’s not only fertilizer and farming machinery companies that will take a knock if conservation farming picks up, companies involved in supplying insecticides will also suffer. Conservation farming naturally kills bugs by rotating the yearly crop.
“You are breaking the life cycle of any insect. By rotating the crop that insect doesn’t have time to breed. You are also increasing your soil content because different plants have different soil contents. Maize needs a lot of zinc; soy beans don’t require any. You are regenerating your soil. You’ll need less and less fertilizer and insecticides by creating natural compost.”
When the world’s population hits nine billion in 2050, there will more people eating food than can be grown, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The agriculture industry has many mouths to feed and a mountain of problems to climb. These are the issues that have made the rest of the world turn to Africa, a continent rich with untouched arable land but producing merely 2% of the world’s food.
“Africa is basically the last natural resource that hasn’t been fully developed for agriculture and urbanization in the world. China has already destroyed 27% of their arable land with industrial waste. Their population is expanding and they have no land. So they are climbing into Africa, lapping up every piece of arable land for their population. It’s not just China, it’s also the Islamic belt and yet Africans, sitting on all these resources, are the poorest people in the world with the most land. We can’t even feed ourselves,” says Hammond.
Hammond may be far from home but it hasn’t left him. Among the maize, he admits to testing a yield of tobacco. He even built a smoke house next to the anthill. The problem is Zambia isn’t a tobacco country but could soon be a nation of better maize growers.

Waiting For The Rains And God

A sea of deep blue flowers borders the highway between Harare and Bulawayo. The 74 acres of heavenly blues, morning glory, dahlias and lemon drops are part of an experiment.
Charlene Mathonsi’s project began a year ago, when the 29-year-old approached new farmers in the Kadoma district of the Mashonaland West province, hoping to convince them to cultivate flower seeds instead of Zimbabwe’s staple maize and tobacco crops. With seeds from the Netherlands and basic skills learned from former white farmers, the Chemagora Collective has produced seven tons of seeds ready for export.
Zimbabwe has exported flower seeds to Rotterdam for more than 20 years, peaking at $60 million in 2004, but as the economy wilted, exports dropped by nearly 70%.
Reviving Lion’s Head, the Mathonsi family farm, meant cooperating with new farmers to turn flowers into a cash crop. But the farm’s survival also relied on earning the respect and collaboration of the 40 laborers who called the farm home for generations before the Mathonsis purchased the 1,236 acres of land.
“For me, the biggest challenge was the women. I think in my first few months I actually cried,” says Mathonsi.
“If you come in as a woman, even though you have the education, these people have been working the land. I’m a young girl, 10 [years] or so younger than them, and I’m instructing them what to do.”
While the male workers immediately accepted Mathonsi in her new role as farm manager, the women resisted.
“They have an established hierarchy. You say something and they do something else. They’re not listening and you feel small,” she explains.
It was only several months later, once Mathonsi had proved that she could work just as hard as the next woman, that she finally gained their trust and respect.
“I think they’re the backbone of this. They’re the ones who work the land, so if you don’t have them on your side, you’re doomed to fail.”
Zimbabwe’s aggressive agrarian reform policies and emphasis on agriculture as a source of independence and income has resulted in a generation of women with more say on the land they till. But Mathonsi is quick to add that it is women of privilege and education, like her, and not necessarily the semi-skilled laborers, who benefit.
“The girl child and women are the most vulnerable. Working with them for me is the most important thing I try to encourage our kids to go to school and try to help financially, especially the girl children, because if you don’t educate them, they’ll be just like their mothers and be back in the field. That is not progress. It’s a cycle of poverty.”
Graduating with a degree in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Zimbabwe, Mathonsi was forced to return to the family farm when she could not find a job in a failing economy.
“It was just such a difficult time,” recalls Mathonsi, who jokes that she may have blocked out the worst memories of that period.
“We would pay salaries knowing that the money would be worth nothing the next day.”
That year’s grain harvest not only became a source of income, but a source of survival, as the family bartered grain for basic necessities and distributed the little that remained for food.
“We were lucky that we grew sorghum that year, because there was no maize in the country and the crop saved a lot of lives not only our own, but people in the area.”
The land Mathonsi returned to after her studies had changed drastically. Between 2000 and 2004, Zimbabwe’s Fast-Track Land Reform program saw 170,000 new black farmers occupy 4,000 white-owned farms. The program was a controversial one, plagued by violence and corruption. Europe and the United States reacted to news coverage of white farms being attacked and burned by sanctioning the already ailing economy.
As the dust settled, many of the new farmers struggled to maintain production rates. The commercial farm next door to the Mathonsis’ Lion’s Head became a subdivided village of 50 families, made up of war veterans, former teachers and other public servants.
Kicked off the land after more than a decade, the former farm owner who Mathonsi did not want to name, formed an unlikely bond with the recent graduate, and became her mentor.
“All the contacts, all the advice, is all [from] him,” says Mathonsi who credits her success to this vital relationship.
She was advised to convert the struggling dairy farm into a beef and crops farm.
Kadoma district is Zimbabwe’s rural heartland, and innovative ideas like the Chemagora Collective are not common practice elsewhere in the country.
In areas with better rainfall and more fertile soil, the sacrifices of Zimbabwe’s land reform policies are beginning to yield a healthy profit.
Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land is a collection of reams of data and tables of statistics that aims to prove that the land rogram implemented by President Robert Mugabe’s regime has created a new generation of farmers who are reaping the rewards. Following first-time black farmers, who turned Zimbabwe’s large-scale tobacco, maize and cattle farms to small-scale communal farms, with more unconventional crops like tomatoes and pumpkins, the publication argues that the three decades of empowering black farmers has made southern Africa’s former bread basket a model for reformation.
However, the Commercial Farmers’ Union has pointed out that Zimbabwe’s agricultural output is less than a third of what it was in the 1990s and that the country is still reliant on food aid.
“There is always a period in which farmers are learning and looking for investment,” says Ben Cousins, a researcher with the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies.
Cousins says Zimbabwe’s strategy shows that it is possible to subdivide singularly owned commercial farms to benefit more people.
“There is lots of room for agency for the farmers themselves, they do not have to be passive beneficiaries of the state,” he explains.
For Mathonsi and the farmers of the Chemagora project, circulation of the US dollar has been a relief, with their flower seeds selling at $3 a kilogram. They say the government’s goal to reintroduce the Zimbabwean dollar will be a setback to the their cash crop.
“What kind of Zim dollar would it be? Would it be the Zim dollar that runs like it did the last time?” wonders Mathonsi.
While land reform has empowered half a million black farmers since independence, the policy still does not guarantee ownership, because the state-based tenure system means that land can no longer be bought or sold.
“When you get this land, what says it’s yours?” asks Mathonsi, who believes real empowerment is marked by a title deed.
“I feel safe in the fact that my parents bought this farm, my family owns it. Yes, our title deeds don’t work, but I have that knowledge that through any sweat, any tears, I know its ownership. It’s not going away, so I will do anything in my power to make sure it works out.”
Cousins agrees that ownership would make access to finance easier.
“Yes rights need to be clarified, but there’s no evidence that you need private property for land to be productive.”
Now as comfortable branding a cow as she is negotiating export rates, Mathonsi and Lion’s Head have weathered the economic storm.
To break even each month, the farm needs $3,000, but Zimbabwe’s continued political isolation and subsequent sanctions make credit impossible. Mathonsi has had to sell a few head of cattle to get the hard cash she needs to pay wages.
Despite the continuous challenges, land in Zimbabwe is as emotional an issue as it is practical. Usually ready with a smile, Mathonsi is passionate but pragmatic as she talks about what the land means to her.
“Land is where the cash is at. Working the land is the basis; I’m the block on which the economy is built.”
She is also clear that it is people who ultimately give land its value.
“It’s not a nine-to-five job. It’s driving pregnant women to the hospital at three o’clock in the morning because they are your workers, you have to look after them. You bury them. It’s like a village. You are a success if they are a success. Failing is not an option. You cannot disengage.”

Harvesting change: Zimbabwe’s new farmers

Every day, 69-year-old Piet Kemp ventures out onto his farm, where the laborers speak neither English nor Afrikaans, at a time when many people are retiring. He is starting afresh 13,000 kilometers away from home, chasing the impossible dream.
In 2010, Georgia’s government asked the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA) to help revive its once mighty farming industry. South African farmers would take their years of experience in cattle and crop farming to Georgia.
TAU SA cite violent attacks on many farmers in South Africa as one of the reasons to take up the opportunity to farm on freehold land in a country that wants its farms to work again.
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Kemp was one of those farmers who heeded the call. Before leaving for Georgia, Kemp was a corn and cattle farmer near Ermelo in South Africa’s north-eastern province, Mpumalanga. He has been living in Georgia with his family since 2011, renting around 700 hectares of land, cultivating corn and wheat.
“It’s a difficult land to farm in. Sometimes, when the tractor is broken you can’t get things from the shop. We wait a long time for parts,” he says.
As for speaking Georgian fluently, he says his wife, Martie, is better at it, but a translator often helps them communicate with his 26 laborers.
It’s been nearly two years since skilled South African farmers, such as Kemp, boarded a plane for the former Soviet republic of Georgia on the promise of cheap freehold land. This country is as big as the Free State province in South Africa.
But not all Georgians welcomed them with open arms. Many said the authorities should be supporting them instead of immigrants. Two months ago, the Georgian government passed a moratorium on selling land to foreigners until 2014.
Bennie van Zyl, general manager of TAU SA, says that Georgia is an attractive country for South African farmers because of its safety and efficiency. His organization takes around 160 farmers on tour every year in the hope of selling the dream.
“Our intention is not to take all the farmers to Georgia, 90% [on the tour] still consider the offer, while around 10% say no,” he says.
Back home, reforms by the country’s ruling African National Congress to transfer white-owned farms to black people, following the fall of apartheid, is another reason that drove white farmers to leave. When apartheid ended in 1994, nearly all the commercial farms belonged to white people. This inequity of land ownership dates back to the Natives’ Land Act of 1913.
Many farmers grew angry when the government started to redistribute farmland. Kemp says it was one of the reasons he felt he had to leave.
According to Reuters, the number of white farmers in South Africa has decreased by a third to 40,000 in the past 15 years.
But Georgia is not the only country where South African farmers are sought after. Van Zyl says there’s been demand for farmers by other countries on the continent. Around 800 South African farmers are farming in, or extended their farms into Mozambique. Other countries showing a keen interest in farmers from South Africa and Zimbabwe are Congo-Brazzaville and Zambia.
This means that farmers such as Kemp are foot soldiers in the field trying to justify their radical decision to leave home in an attempt to find greener pastures in the autumn of
life.

Tag: Farmers

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