Farming is my passion. I first learnt to farm as a child. When I was young, planting crops was day-to-day work in my family. I worked with my mother and aunty ploughing, planting, weeding, harvesting. My grandfather had sorghum and mielies, wheat and vegetables enough to feed the whole community. At the end of the season he would have more than 500 bags of wheat and mielies.

I moved to Johannesburg for work and for a while I got distracted and my passion for farming seemed to be declining, but then I lost my job. It made me realise that this economy is so insecure. You can never feel safe while you are working for someone else. I wanted to do something that made me feel self-sufficient. I wanted to be sure that every day I could wake up and know what my job was. I decided to focus back on farming. This land that I work belongs to my family but it was no longer being used, so in 2019 I decided to start farming it.

My goal is to get to a point where I don’t have to worry. Not struggle. I want to be sure that every day there will be food to eat. I want to be able to do that not only for myself, but also for other people. My dream is to create jobs, hire people, contribute to making life a little easier in my community. I am helping one primary school in my community with gardening and planting spinach, beetroot, onion and tomatoes, because I want to be supportive and young children need good nutrition.

I had my childhood farming experience, but having Sizwe from SocioTech to advise me, has also been very helpful. Through Sizwe I have learned a professional and effective way of planting. Before, I just put things in the ground. Now, I am all about soil enrichment. I learnt so much more than trench beds and feeding the soil from SocioTech. Sizwe has taught me business skills (managing money, costing and so forth) and most important of all, ways of thinking. From Sizwe I learnt patience. He didn’t give up on me. When I was about to give up, he would support me and help me to keep going. He keeps coming back. He has helped me to see that I can expand and grow from a small subsistence operation into a medium and maybe even large scale enterprise. He has taught me about double digging and square meter planting and all of that makes me hopeful about the future. That is the great thing about SocioTech – there are no limits placed on progress. 

I am very interested to explore the opportunities in agro-processing. I think that can be part of my business plan moving forward. I want to find ways of having seasonal crops available to my customers all year round. I have been experimenting with dehydrating vegetables. Grating them and putting them in the oven on low heat. I have taken the results to the University of Limpopo to see if the nutrient content is affected.