The Right Advice Saves The Day

Shadrack Mbele has been getting good returns from sugar bean since first planting it in 2014. Sabrina Dean visited him in the eastern Free State to find out more about his production techniques, and how he brought this season’s crop back from the brink of disaster.

- Sabrina Dean

Shadrack Mbele was attending a meeting in Pretoria one morning in February when he received the phone call he had been dreading all season. His cropping manager and nephew, Champion Mbele, told him that a hailstorm had destroyed his entire sugar bean crop, which was uninsured.

“I just left my meeting and drove straight back to the farm,” recalls Mbele.

Looking at photographs of the sugar bean lands, it is difficult to imagine that anything could have recovered. The crop had been reduced to little more than broken stalks on the 80ha he had leased for the 2017/2018 cropping season.

Yet some months later, Mbele managed to achieve a harvest of 1,5t/ha, thanks to getting the right advice at the right time.

BEGINNING WITH DAIRY SHORTHORN CATTLE

Mbele lives on his own farm, Danielsrus (226ha), near the leased sugar bean lands, and runs a mixed farming business called Tugela. A second-generation farmer, he inherited the farm, located between Kestell and Harrismith in the Free State, from his father, Ephraime.

The latter worked as head stockman for a Dairy Shorthorn farmer for decades, then tried working in a taxi business owned by Mbele. He missed farming so much, however, that in 1993 he leased land at Diyatalawa, and went on to establish his own award-winning Dairy Shorthorn herd.

In 1994, he applied for land under the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development process but received the title deed only in 2010.

Mbele spent years working as a teacher in Bethlehem while investing in his other business ventures. He retired from teaching in 2006 and joined his father at the farm full-time, investing all the proceeds from his pension and taxi business in the farm.

The farm had only about 60ha of viable cropping land, where the father-and-son team planted crops such as lucerne, oats and radishes for the cattle.