Jim Tukane wears a warm smile as he stands in his wheat field with the ripening ears reaching up beyond his belly.
His battered old tractor groans into sight. “The tractor must rest for 15 minutes at the end of each row and drink five litres of water,” he says.
Tukani epitomises the indefatigable spirit of new commercial farmers in Stormberg, Eastern Cape. He began his career in the shoe department at the local Pep Stores. He was the shop’s manager when he resigned 18 years later to try his hand at crop farming.
The switch was not easy. Tukani and 14 others bought their 216ha farm, Isidingo, in December 2000. The 15 partners each raised R16 000 in government subsidies. The R240 000 in their pool enabled them to borrow another R230 000 from the Land Bank to buy Isidingo. The R470 000 price included a few implements.
“When we came to the farm we saw the power of lucerne. We asked New World Foundation to help us and we planted eight hectares of new lucerne. We harvested it and it has kept us alive until now. Then we planted mealies and cabbages, and we planted cotton. Now we are waiting for the wheat to ripen. We also have six cattle, three of which we are milking and three of which are pregnant.”
Tukani has nothing but praise for his mentor, Lewis van den Berg, whose help should have ended in December last year but who continues to impart his skills to the emerging farmers.
“The government employed Van den Berg from next door to be our mentor. We did not know him, apart from having bought the odd sheep or goat over the years. He is one of the most experienced farmers in the district … He’s God-given to people like us trying to make something work without operating capital,” says Tukani.
Tukani has set his sights on the upper rungs of the farming value chain.
“We want to establish a large-scale dairy, but that is not the final goal. We want to put up small factories to produce yoghurt and cheese. We’ve already sent some of the children for training,” he says.
Another promising commercial farmer is Alfred Faku, from nearby Hofmeyr. He gave up a job as a storeman for a radiator company in Johannesburg in 1999 and bought an abandoned 98ha farm with his life savings, which he supplemented with borrowed money.
His first step was to enter into a joint venture with a neighbouring ostrich farmer to start a brick-making plant. He keeps cattle, sheep and goats. His farm used to supply dairy products to Hofmeyr, but he could not afford the equipment so the milk now comes from Cradock 60km away.
Faku battles with fixing up windmills, boreholes and faulty pumps. He can see the Fish river irrigation scheme from his land, but has no pipeline.
Joseph Pieterse, coordinator of the Stormberg Farmers Association, says training new commercial farmers is at the top of his association’s agenda.
“The first thing we did was to get profiles of all the farms. Then we embarked on training and capacity building.”
Other institutions have been involved in training, including the Umnga Farmers Training Centre in Grootfontein and the Agriculture Development Institute in Middelburg. Training also includes business management and administration.
Pieterse says he would like to see the new commercial farmers organised into commercial cooperatives.
“For example, we could set up a poultry slaughtering plant in Hofmeyr where the entire region’s chickens can be slaughtered. This would create jobs in Hofmeyr [and] the plant would belong to the greater Stormberg community.”
The two-year old Stormberg Emerging Farmers Association is headquartered in Cradock and is an umbrella body for new commercial farmers across the district. Its projects support 420 families.
Credit also goes to the National Development Agency (NDA), which has funded the association since its inception, and to the Department of Agriculture, which paid the mentors.
Nkululeko Somhlahlo, the NDA’s programme director, described the Stormberg initiative as a “model for working with prospective black farmers to transform a mindset of subsistence activism into readiness to access the mainstream commercial terrain in agri-industry … This notion includes full participation in value chain management by the previously disadvantaged in the agricultural sector.”