Imagine if the next time you needed to toss together a salad, spice up a meal or garnish an after-dinner treat, you only went as far as your balcony, rooftop or garden to source the ingredients. If you are a city-dweller in sub-Saharan Africa, that is more possible than you think.
Urban farming is mushrooming on the continent, almost as quickly as the rate at which people are moving into cities. Around 40% of the African population (around 375 million people) are metropolitan residents and that number will grow to 60% by 2050. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 150 million of those people grow their own food.
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A handful of them are hipsters who nurture herb gardens while practising yoga and preaching about organic eating and low carbon footprints. Hundreds of thousands more are after more than just a feel-good factor. Just as urban farming became part of the recovery after the First World War and is being used by Cubans to combat crippling sanctions, in Africa it is solving some of society’s most severe problems. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most under-nourished region and is rife with hunger and unemployment.
The FAO cited Malawi, Cameroon and Ghana, where up to 50% of households have vegetable gardens, as three countries with successful urban farming programs. South Africa is not far behind, with steps being taken to encourage urban farming in a country where around 20% of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from.
“Urban agriculture projects strive to reduce food security and create economic upliftment. Growing food in the backyard of your shack can be the difference between going hungry and having a healthy meal on the table for your family,” says Catherine Nicks, the Project Manager of Tyisa Nabanye, a non-profit urban agriculture organization which runs a farm on the slopes of Signal Hill in Cape Town.
Tyisa Nabanye occupies land on ERF 81, one of the original sites of agriculture in the Cape that dates back to the 1700s. Although it is historically farmland, these days it is not an ideal place to grow crops. While the clay soil remains nutrient rich, the area is often lashed by heavy rains and strong winds which destroy a harvest overnight. But Nicks and a team of seven others have found a way of working with the elements instead of fighting them through an ideology of permaculture.
“We practice companion planting in our garden, where certain vegetables are planted together with certain herbs and play different roles. Some plants feed or fix nutrients in the soil, others repel or attract insects that perform specific functions,” says Nicks.
“We find that kale and spinach do well in our garden, partly because they need little attention and they grow year round. And partly because they sell well, people cannot get enough of the very limited kale in the city.”
Kale is the new ‘it’ food and is often used in green juice where it is blended with spinach, cucumber and apple to create a healthy brew. One-Juice, a company that specializes in selling these drinks, buys some of its kale directly from Tyisa Nabanye. By doing that, they have created a direct connection between customers that are conscious of where their food comes from and the producers who supply that food.
People who drink One-Juice’s products only have to ask where the raw materials come from to be directed to Tyisa Nabanye. There they are welcome to see for themselves how the crops are grown. Nicks meets many of them personally, answers questions, introduces them to the gardeners and invites them to
come back.
“Urban farming is largely about reducing the distance between farm and fork, about increasing ones understanding about where our food comes from. We now know the name of our farmer as well as our doctor,” says Nicks.
“It’s about knowing what a gooseberry looks like before it has been dehusked, washed and placed on a layer of bubble wrap in a plastic container, what the leaf of a watermelon plant looks like and how tall a tomato plant can grow. We use our garden to share our knowledge about where our food comes from and how we can be more sustainable.”
But it’s not as simple as that. The 8.2–hectares, of which Tyisa Nabanye does not even occupy a tenth, is owned by the South African National Defence Force and run by the Department of Public Works. The farm does not have a lease to operate and there are constant bureaucratic battles to overcome, despite a policy in place which promotes urban farming.
In June 2007, the City of Cape Town drafted an urban agriculture policy in which stated its vision to create a ‘prosperous and growing urban agriculture sector,’ which would center on poverty alleviation and job creation. By encouraging agriculture in the city, the government hoped to take steps to increase food security and provide people with a sustainable income source.
More than five years after the document was tabled, the city reached an agreement with the Oranjezicht City Farm (OZCF) to turn a disused bowling green into a bowl of greens, literally. The farm uses that phrase as its slogan now. It was the city’s first pop-culture urban farm and quickly captured the attention of Capetonians because it was promoted as a community space.
OZCF connected itself to locals through a weekly market which sold fresh vegetables grown on the farm and grew to include a variety other stalls. It became the place to be on a Saturday morning for socializing, sipping on fair-trade coffee or craft beer or even trying a hand at farming as one of the OZCF volunteers. But the quaintness did not last.
The farm is situated on a heritage site and city officials require certain safety requirements to be met to accommodate the foot traffic and a proper market licence to trade. In early December, news broke that the market would stop until those boxes were ticked and the young and beautiful were outraged. They had grown to think of OZCF as a public property and exerted enough pressure to move the market to the official residence of the province’s Premier, Helen Zille, from where it continues to operate from.
The fracas over OZCF remains unresolved but it achieved something the community wanted most; it created awareness. Residents cared enough about where their food was coming from to go to where it was being grown. They watch it flower and flourish, buy it unwashed and unpackaged, cook it themselves, eat it and share it with others. If that sentiment lasts, urban farming will continue growing in Africa and could become as commercially viable as it in Beijing, where half the vegetables consumed in the city are in grown in urban farms.
With that in mind, go on and grow
a little.

Farming Coming  To A Town Near You

It was early morning, the sun was blazing. Tommie van Zyl walks over to Wilson Mashola, one of the drivers at the farm, standing near the entrance of a warehouse, where thousands of tomatoes are being loaded onto a yellow truck. Tommie greets Mashola in his mother tongue, Khelobedu, the language of this part of Limpopo, in northern South Africa. The language is similar to northern-Sotho, seTswana and Tshivenda and it’s not easy to learn. The two hug and share a few jokes. Tommie turns to say that Mashola has been a driver on the family farm for 32 years.
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Tommie inherited this knack of communication from his father. In a country with 11 official languages, Tommie speaks three tongues of the people of Limpopo, as well as his mother tongue Afrikaans, and English. He’s a strange millionaire, dressed in a plain blue shirt, chinos and veldskoene—hardy shoes typically worn by South African farmers. At first glance you wouldn’t think Tommie is chief executive officer of this massive multi million rand tomato farm.
It was his choice, when he returned from studying in the States in 1986, to shun the khakis worn by many a farmer.
“I always ask what we can do to remain relevant. Some of them still wear it, but I felt in order to be one with the people, you need to change stereotypes about Afrikaans farmers,” he says.
Nestled in the valley of Mooketsi around 400km north of Johannesburg, the farm is the home of the ZZ2 brand. It’s famous across the continent for tomatoes—harvesting around 170,000 tons a year from 2,000 hectares (ha).
The name dates back to 1906 after the end of the war when farmers were compelled to get a registered number with which to brand their cattle. The authorities gave each of the van Zyl brothers a number from ZZ1 to ZZ4. ZZ2 was the brand of the second eldest brother Burt, grandfather to Bertie and great grandfather to Tommie—who used it as the trademark for what was to become the biggest tomato farm in the southern hemisphere.
Tommie’s father, Bertie, left school at 16 to take over the farm from his ailing father. In those days, the van Zyl’s had a mixed crop, mainly potatoes, and life was difficult. Bertie realized that his neighbor made more money from tomatoes than potatoes and convinced his father to change. The first crop was harvested four years later.
The climate in the Mooketsi valley was just right. Tomatoes flourished all year round and soon, the farm was rich. Over the years, the van Zyl’s diversified into avocados, onions, stone fruit and beef.
The company also has farms in Musina, Limpopo, near the border with Zimbabwe. They grow apples and pears in Ceres and Riebeek-West in the Western Cape as well as Langkloof in the Eastern Cape. Marketing manager Clive Garret says a new crop, is dates, farmed in Hakiesdoorn in the Karas region of southern Namibia. The company hopes to harvest their first crop of dates within the next year.
Bertus Venter, Production manager and agronomist at ZZ2, says dates are in high demand during the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan, due to their high energy and nutritional properties. The climate in the southern hemisphere allows for the growing of fresh dates to be available during that holy month.
“As far as business growth is concerned, we’re constantly looking at how we should adapt our business. We benchmark ourselves against the best in the world and we will adapt our system to the well adapted to the environment we’re in. We’re firmly established in South Africa, but also where it makes economic sense in neighboring countries,” says Tommie.
It’s been a long road to the tomato millions for Tommie. While growing up, he started to learn the trade, though he says he didn’t walk into managing the company.
“I didn’t get the job because I was the son of the owner. My father was a very strict man and he didn’t want us to go to school.”
Bertie wanted Tommie to stop going to school after grade eight, but with the help of neighbors and uncles, he persuaded his father to allow him to study.
Tommie completed an undergraduate B.Comm degree in economics and agricultural economics at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. When he found he couldn’t play any other sport, he opted for boxing, gaining full sports colors while studying.
Following his completion of a postgraduate honors degree, he was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to learn for a Master of Science in food and resource economics at the University of Florida, in the States. While there, he was also awarded membership to Gamma Sigma Delta, an international honor society dedicated to recognizing accomplishments of leaders in agriculture and the related sciences, at the very least he vindicated his neighbors and uncles.
On completion of his studies in 1986, Tommie returned to the family farm. He started off as a buying clerk in the purchasing office, expanding his responsibilities and started to farm a year later. At the age of 27, in 1992, he cut his teeth and became managing director for operations, property and investments.
“But we had a very interesting managing system. I had the title and the responsibility, but not necessarily at that time, the authority. I grew into authority and probably since 2001, we established proper governing structures that gave me full authority as chief executive officer, reporting to our board of directors, but since 1992, I had the title of chief executive officer,” he says.
The father of four took over the reins of the multi million rand conglomerate in 2005 after his father died. His son, Burtie, is following in the family footsteps, starting off as a junior project manager and coming through the ranks to his current position of general manager for the avocado plantations. One of Tommie’s twin daughters is studying genetics and horticulture and the other geography and environmental science; his eldest daughter is a jewelry designer.
When he is not farming, the 54-year-old enjoys reading books on philosophy, business and economics, and sometimes takes long walks through the countless rows of tomato fields.
The saying, never judge a book by its cover or a tomato by its skin, couldn’t be truer when Tommie suggests a helicopter flight over the farm. He jumps into the pilot seat and starts the rotor blades—a farmer of many talents. He obtained his private pilot’s license with night rating for an airplane and more recently a helicopter license. From the sky, the tomato and avocados look like neatly laid-out football fields.
From here, tomatoes are exported to Reunion, Dubai, Seychelles and Oman, while around 3,000 tons of avocados go to Europe. The rest of the produce is sold through the fresh markets in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their biggest competitor is Azura in Morroco.
Around 20 trucks are on the road daily, transporting nearly 4,000 tons per week to a warehouse in Johannesburg, where they are divided and dispatched to various stores across the country, and to sellers. Tommie says hawkers are one of their biggest customers. They buy products cheaply in bulk and sell them on streets and small shops.
ZZ2 also has a commercial herd, consisting mainly of Pinzgauers, which roam on non-arable land, for the breeding of weaners on high-valued stud cattle. The farm is also involved in wildlife conservation with fenced conservancies measuring 23,721ha. The game includes white rhino, nyala, gemsbuck, red hartebeest, giraffe, impala, kudu, Burchell’s zebra and eland.
The livestock alone is worth R30 million ($3.3 million) and the game R8.5 million ($940,000).
In a time when many of the country’s mines are being lambasted of raking in huge profits at the expense of the people, ZZ2  built small villages for the workers and their families nearer to the farms.
Tommie says each farm has its own clinic as they are far away from the nearest hospital. They provide bus services for workers’ children to a nearby primary school and also support a farm school and 13 créche’s for around 300.
Each farm has its own vehicle workshop where the school buses and the trucks get serviced by professionals.
ZZ2 employs around 8,000 people in South Africa, of whom around 6,500 are based at the headquarters. The farm also employs people in neighboring countries from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, who carry out seasonal work.
With over 60,000ha—and counting—of farming land, ZZ2 turns over around R900,000 ($98,657) for tomatoes alone and nearly a R1.1 billion ($120 million) for the entire company. But the tomato farmer says this is humbling.
“When you think you’re king, you’re paw-paw, when you think you’re paw-paw, you’re king. I’m very intrigued by value in a broad sense. Money doesn’t really impress us. We’re impressed by the value of the things we produce and the meaning that we’re creating for many people,” says Tommie.
As the autumn sun sets over the farm, the workers pack their tools and dust off their boots, as one shift ends and a new one begins at the entrance of the warehouse. Looking far away over the horizon Tommie would like to employ more of them next year and expand the tomato business. In these recessionary times, there can be few businesses that can look at the sunset and say that.

Tag: Plantations

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