A car accident made this graphic designer more grounded, and take to farming, tending to vegetables on a piece of land far from Johannesburg. 



About 250kms from the sanitized suburbs of Sandton in South
Africa’s Gauteng province is Randfontein, a rugged gold mining city in the West
Rand, where we meet 31-year-old Katlego Pitse on his farm where he is currently
producing rows of crisp green lettuce. 



A few years ago, the Soweto-born farmer was far from any
piece of earth, and closer to a computer desktop, earning a living as a graphic
designer. 



The only definition he gave himself was as a
‘creative’.&nbsp; 



“Straight after high school, I studied graphic design from
2008 until 2012. From there on, I pursued a career in commercial arts.
Advertising is the number one industry that absorbs creatives,” says Pitse of
his ‘other job’.



He worked for various companies in Johannesburg and his
career was well on to greener pastures as he enjoyed a hefty salary with annual
increments and a lavish lifestyle, until an unfortunate incident threw him out
of gear. Pitse was involved in a road accident in 2015 and the snazzy, pricey
car he had been spending so much on, had to be written off. The accident was a
facilitator, as he was faced with some life-defining choices, and the prospect
of a new direction, one that made him more grounded.



“I had to start over. This was the kind of catalyst that
gave me a bit of a wakeup call; going forward, [I realized] if I was to spend
money, it had to be on valuable assets that are going to yield returns that can
be passed on,” he says.



He left a full-time job to freelance at a night club; this
is where he was exposed to the day-to-day operations of a business. It helped
him take to entrepreneurship, pursuing agriculture full-time; which had been a
burning desire since his days as an art student thumbing through agriculture
magazines. 



“I was constantly doing research. It was something I knew I
wanted to do but I wasn’t sure when I was going to be able to pursue it fully
because you need an actual career,” he says.



“There was an article I read about a farmer based in
Winterveld. I called to ask if I could visit to see his operation in 2015. Just
that farm visit was an inspiration to start my business.”



Pitse saved up enough money to buy a vacant two-and-half
hectare plot in Randfontein for R200,000 ($13,400). It took him three years to
start production, during which time he pursued his graphic design career on the
side. 



In 2019, the first year of production, Pitse focused on
cucumbers – his pet passion – and did cycles of long English cucumbers. Due to
the high costs, Pitse had to re-evaluate and decided to move to a less
cumbersome crop, lettuce.



Pitse is currently employing two family members and still
does the odd graphic design job to supplement his income. 



Surely, a small-scale farmer with big graphic dreams of the
future.

Katlego 485

Soil Toil: How A Car Accident Made This Graphic Designer More Grounded

Stars are still out as Dirk Schlebusch starts work at 4AM. It is the busiest time of day for him as truckloads of potatoes arrive at the Joburg Market. In the next few hours, they will be traded as commodities worth millions.
The market’s 10 halls, that span 64 hectares, are piled high with pallets of every kind of fruit and vegetable. This is the primary fresh produce exchange of South Africa as well as destinations across Africa. It is also the largest of its kind in the world.
Before noon, the dynamics of supply and demand, of middlemen’s mark-up and the whims of what nature offers up on the day, merge to determine the first price tag on fresh produce as it exits the market. Food price inflation and food security issues are becoming more and more important as population numbers explode and demand soars. It puts the links in the chain, like the passage of food through the market, under increasing scrutiny.
Schlebusch is a buyer with Wenpro, one of the most established agents at the market. They serve as middlemen between producers and buyers. He specializes in potatoes, like his father has done for 40 years.
Potatoes and onions are big sellers at the Joburg Market and together fill out their own hall. An average day sees around 1.4 million kilograms of potatoes traded.
Schlebusch has standard daily orders from big retail chains, wholesalers and the companies that process vegetables for frozen food products. He also sells to restaurants, hawkers and walk-in buyers.
“We have potatoes for everything and potatoes with every kind of price tag to suit whatever buyers are looking for.”
When determining a daily price, Schlebusch checks the quality of physical stock that arrived on the day, examining stats from previous days and pulling up stock sheets that detail the availability of potatoes throughout the market.
With fresh produce you don’t have the luxury of stockpiling for extended periods to influence the market in the hope of fetching a higher price. It’s too much of a gamble &#8211; fresh food perishes or loses quality and there’s no saying what hand nature will play.
Schlebusch says it’s ultimately down to supply and demand, the best produce still fetches the best prices and the highest bidder still wins. It’s how the market has functioned for 120 years, from the days of its origins in Newtown. The market is just a few years younger than when the city of Johannesburg itself was founded.
Schlebusch’s ear is glued to a phone, communicating with buyers and farmers throughout the day.
“It is about relationships. If you don’t give your farmers the service they expect they’ll go to another agent and if your buyers don’t get the produce at the prices they want they will also go somewhere else,” he says.
As he chats, a call comes through from an anxious farmer. A lorry has been delayed; it never made it to market on time to join the sample displays. It means an instant drop in price for the farmer as his potatoes become day-old stock.
It’s the middle of July, and at the market the bulk purchase price of Grade 1 bananas is worked out at around R4.45 a kilogram (R1=$0.10). They will end up in the mid-range supermarket upwards of R8.99 a kilo. The top-grade potatoes are selling at R46 for 10 kilograms. The price almost doubles at retailers.
The price gap from market to retail comes with everyone along the value chain taking their cut. Tracy Davids, an analyst at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP), says day to day market prices are more volatile than what end consumers see at retail level. The price hikes come from transport and labor costs, repackaging, labeling and operational and distribution overheads that retailers incur. Added to this is the rising fuel and electricity costs in South Africa.
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Davids says managing food inflation ultimately comes down to having a more robust economy.
“Food security will always be a critical issue and at the end of the day it’s the consumer who pays more and more as costs in the value chain increase, which is why we need effective value chains,” she says.
Piet van Zyl, who runs Wenpro’s fruit section, outlines some of the unique challenges of handling fresh produce. Although the value chain comes with mark-ups, disruptions can cause even more hikes. Wenpro has seven cold rooms, each runs at around $470 to $560 a month. It makes load shedding and power cuts his biggest nightmares. Agents are responsible for the upkeep of their own pallets and fleets of forklift trucks that criss-cross the halls in urgent beeps. Agents are also responsible for the health, safety and general cleanliness of their halls. It adds up to operating costs that run into the millions.
“Agents must perform and grow or the market will start taking away your floor space,” he says, waving his gloved hand, protected against the early morning chill, across the expanse of the hall that is Wenpro’s terrain.
Agents must be able to offload produce fast enough, retain the integrity of the product on the warehouse floor and sell as quickly as possible at the best price possible.
“Sometimes the agent’s buyers resort to salvage sale, it means they will make up the loss from their profits to make sure that the farmer still gets his base asking price. It keeps the farmer loyal to the agent and opens up floor space. Good buyers know where they can afford to take a loss and where they can make a profit,” says Van Zyl.
Agents take up to 7% on any deal, 4% goes directly to the agent’s buyers. The market takes a 5% cut.
It’s something that’s top of mind for Gugu Hadebe. She is the director of Egoly, the newest of the market’s three Black Economic Empowerment agents.
Hadebe says breaking into the market as a black woman was not easy. Her advantage is that she was previously employed by the Joburg Market. She understands the role of agents as well as the cultural, political and historical nuances attached to farming in South Africa. Another significant insight she had was to team up with old hands in the business, which plainly put, meant white males.
“I knew I had to have the right partners, people who have been in the game longer than I have been, people who have built relationships with farmers and buyers,” she says.
Egoly currently has eight sales staff. They concentrate on selling to hawkers rather than competing at this stage, with the likes of Wenpro, with its 350 staffers, who target bigger fish like retail giants.
“There is a big hawkers market out there that’s still growing in South Africa. People still buy from the [old lady] on the street where they pay less, where they may know the seller and they pick and choose as they like,” says Hadebe.
Each of the market’s 14 agents has to find its niche to deliver a value-add. Some do specialty items like sourcing exotic dragon fruit from South East Asia, or making sure there’s enough ginger for the explosion of sushi bars across the country. Others offer pre-packaged produce or some, like Egoly, target specific sectors within the pool of buyers.
“We don’t sell anything as a market. It is a free market system, we are just a platform where anyone can come here to sell through an agent or to buy from whomever they choose,” says Simangele Sekgobela, CEO of the Joburg Market.
Sekgobela adds that the market has had to respond to changing demands, like the key issues of traceability of produce and minimizing human handling of food.
“We’ve also had to adapt to meet international standards, which includes things like maintaining an unbroken cold chain and following standards for pesticide limits,” she says.
The adapt or die principle applies to the market, like it does to almost everything else.
“We have seen a decline in the stock that comes through the market in the past few years. Retailers are doing more direct sales from farmers and developing their own storage facilities. In the future, there will also be more virtual sales that will mean produce will not physically come through the market. It’s the reality of a free market, but you’ll never replace the market completely. You will still need the market for its facilities, its quality control and convenience of having everything under one roof,” says Sekgobela.

Why We Pay Through The Nose For Food

It was a hard road to business for Bheki Kunene who grew up poor in the streets of Gugulethu, on the fringes of South Africa’s wealthy tourist city of Cape Town. He was selling peanuts at just 15 years old and then graduated to fruit and vegetables.
When he finished high school, Kunene had to pay his own way to college. There was a new baby in his family which ate up the money needed for fees. Scholarships were his only way to get a higher education and he got one at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2006.
“I got a scholarship to study graphic design which paid for everything provided I get above 75% for all subjects,” says Kunene.
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As part of the course, he had to do a six-month internship at a graphic design company. Instead, he put up R600 ($57) and a computer with two other classmates to start their own business called Mind Trix Media, specializing in web development and design, printing, marketing and developing mobile applications.
His classmates soon left but Kunene quickly landed his first big client – AAA Shuttles. He had to create a website and develop other projects for the tourism company, all on his own. His deadlines for the projects were very tight and he worked tirelessly to prove himself. Ismail Louw, the owner of AAA Shuttles, paid a 50% deposit for a website.
All was going well. But a knock on the door two weeks into the business turned his life upside down.
It was a summer’s morning on a Saturday in December 2010 and Kunene was printing t-shirts. Two detectives walked in. Kunene assumed that they were friends of the local pastor and they were just coming in for a small chat.
“They started asking me questions of where I was the previous night. Then they told me to take off my rings, belt, shoelaces and I knew something was not right,” Kunene says.
To his horror, the detectives arrested Kunene for murder.
“When I got to the police station, they told me they’d torture me like no-one would believe. Each morning it was another torture,” he remembers.
“The more I cried, screaming that I knew nothing about a murder, the police would continue to torture me, claiming that all criminals cried and said that they knew nothing until they were tortured into confessing. But I was telling them the truth.”
The police would punch him in the ribs and stomach. Once they tired of that, they would cuff his hands behind his back and force him to his knees while standing on the cuffs which pulled and squeezed on Kunene’s wrists.
After spending about five days in a tiny cell, the police released him.
“They told me they found the real culprit who had dreadlocks and they thought I had cut my dreadlocks the night before. I cut my dreadlocks a few years ago,” he says.
Kunene immediately went home and was worried about his first big client. He called Louw explaining his ordeal.
Luckily for Kunene, Louw was sympathetic and he kept the contract. It took about three weeks for Kunene to recover from the torment.
Business soon picked up. Word of mouth helped him gain more clients, partnerships and even make his first million rand. Soon, the awards started rolling in. Kunene made it into the top 10 national finalists of the South African Breweries Kick Start Business Competition. This is where he learned how to run a business and met Virgin’s Richard Branson and other motivational entrepreneurs.
“I learned some of the most basic foundation things from these guys. They kind of taught me the frugal lifestyle. They said ‘keep it silent my friend, live below your means and just study,’” Kunene says.
“Each day, I read for an hour and each time I walk down the road I’ve got audio books in my head and I’m learning more each day I’m reading. And I do some of the things these guys taught me.”
One of the best bits of advice Kunene took from the speakers was for him to go see a psychologist immediately after he made his first million because he grew up poor.
“You’d be like the tender guys, up one moment and the next they’re down,” the businessmen told him.
“You have to do it differently if you want to be like us. First thing, go get yourself counseled, understand what you are in now. Next step, learn about investment. Read more and read more,” Kunene remembers.
One question he asked Branson and co was what wealthy people did with their money.
“They said, we take our money and make more money for us. Then we take the interest and buy the fancy stuff. It’s not our money.”
For now, Kunene is earning his future interest with Mind Trix, the company he started from his mother’s house. It then moved to Loop Street in Cape Town’s central business district, and then moved back to the township where it started. Today, it has clients in Zimbabwe, Angola, Vietnam, Italy and the United States.
When I meet Kunene at their offices on the ground floor of a double-storey house, he tells me he hardly does any of the corporate work anymore, but solely focuses on running the business. He hopes to open five more offices and avoid any more painful misunderstandings w

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Soil Toil: How A Car Accident Made This Graphic Designer More Grounded

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