Cape Town — In South Africa's not-too-distant past, the image of a commercial farmer usually brought to mind middle-aged white men in short pants or, in a few cases, black farmers struggling against the odds to compete in far-away markets.
But the stereotype is now being shattered by a number of high-achieving women. Across Africa women produce more than 70 percent of the continent's food, but most of the farming is at a subsistence level, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Among South Africa's successful women farmers is Bongiwe Kali of Nosanda Poultry Farm in Namakwe in the Eastern Cape province. She saw a need for day-old chickens in her area, so she started her own hatchery.
It currently produces five-dozen chicks per week.
Kali supplies mostly to emerging farmers and informal markets in the province, as well as nationally and in neighbouring Lesotho.
Increasingly she has been selling retail outlets as well. Demand has increased to such an extent that she buys 7,000 chicks a week to complement those she hatches.
Kali also has 15 hectares of land under cash crops. She rotates vegetables such as cabbage and spinach, and also grows mealies (corn) and sunflowers to sustain soil quality.
The vegetables are supplied to a local supermarket and informal traders, and the mealies and sunflower seeds are used for chick feed. Kali employs 12 permanent and about 30 seasonal workers, and her profits have financed a sprinkler irrigation system and a new tractor.
Kali is passionate about mentoring and runs monthly workshops to help women interested in growing their own food at home to improve and expand their operations. She says attendance at her workshops has increased from 10 to 25 women over the past two years and many of them are now buying her chicks so they can raise them as supply chickens for customers.
"At first the focus was only on improving vegetable production and growing chicks for their own use," she told AllAfrica, "but now many more of them are interested in learning about business skills so that they can set up their own small enterprises.
"It is heartening to notice that more women are changing their mindsets from subsistence farming to setting up enterprises that can also earn a living for them and their families. There are not many formal agribusinesses at the moment, but I'm hopeful that that will also start to increase."
Ntsiuoa Kobo, 31, and her sister Sebolelo, 28, were encouraged from a young age by their father, Lesitsi, to equip themselves to one day run an agribusiness on the family's land, Thitapoho, about 90km from Bloemfontein in the central Free State province.
The sisters realised their father's dream in 2003 when Ntsiuoa established a hydroponic production enterprise, called Lema Intensive Farming Venture, assisted by Sebolelo.
Little could Kobo senior have imagined then that just six years later Ntsiuoa would be announced as the 2009 national winner of South Africa's Female Farmer of the Year Award, run by the Department of Agriculture, Rural Development and Land Administration (DARDLA).
Using only organic pesticides and fungicides, Lema Intensive Farming Venture produces a range of vegetable crops, including spinach, green beans, tomatoes, African calabash, eggplant, lettuce, and red, green and yellow peppers, all mainly for export to Maseru, Lesotho, where small traders are the main buyers.
The Free State sisters also have a beekeeping enterprise and produce essential oils, the latter the initiative of Sebolelo, who is a qualified aromatherapist.
Once the vegetable crops are harvested and cleaned, they are packed in market-stipulated packaging material.
The Kobo sisters have created eight permanent and 12 seasonal jobs, and they and their staff also transfer food-farming skills to others in their community. In one of their most recent projects they helped a group of women from a nearby orphanage to begin growing vegetables for the children.
Says Ntsiuoa Kobo: "I enjoy providing mentoring... Support forums are helping more women and youths to provide food security for their own households."
And the sisters have more ambition: early next year, when a government-built dam is complete, they want to increase their production of essential oils and to open bed and breakfast accommodation, complete with a massage salon in which Sebolelo can ply her skills.
Makgoro Mannya of Ditubatse Business Enterprise in the Mopani district of South Africa's northernmost province, Limpopo, employs 90 people permanently and 40 seasonally in her agribusiness.
Mannya started her business in 1999 with the production of a popular South African food relish known as atchar from mangoes. The growing demand for her atchar made it viable for her to buy a mango farm in 2006 with a loan from the government's Land Bank.
The state Department of Agriculture helped her through its Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme to install an irrigation system. Early in 2007 Ditubatse acquired EuroGap certification, enabling Mannya to export about 60 percent of her production to Botswana, Europe and Madagascar.
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Currently Mannya's enterprise produces 1,500 tons of mangoes a year, most of it utilised for atchar production, but fresh fruit is also sold.
In addition, she grows 300 tons of avocados, 250 tons of guavas and some litchis for a fruit juice producer.
Mannya has mixed mentoring with business, imparting some of her knowledge and experience to emerging farmers in the area, while at the same time providing them with a market for their produce. She has already signed supplier contracts with 125 individual emerging farming enterprises in the Tzaneen area.
"There are many forums now providing support and technical information to emerging female farmers and many emerging farmers are also forming cooperatives, sharing marketing and other costs and containing input costs through bulk buying," said Mannya, who is the deputy president of the Women in Agriculture and Rural Development (WARD) organization.
"Before 2006, it was difficult for emerging farmers to get access to financing. But since then most of the banks have introduced agribusiness sections which makes it easier, even for women farmers, to finance expansions to their agribusinesses."
