Quality And Efficiency Drive Commercial Lettuce Production

Many people who enjoy lettuce in their salad may not be aware that it can be a fairly challenging crop to grow commercially. Dicky and Koshik Sitaram, whose family have been producing fresh produce for many years in KwaZulu-Natal, shared the lessons they learned with Lloyd Phillips.

- Lloyd Phillips

The Sitaram family’s journey to becoming large-scale commercial fresh produce growers was long and difficult. Their first and perhaps greatest setback was during the apartheid years: they were unable to own land on which to develop their commercial farming operation.

Instead, Raj Sitaram (79) and his sons, Dicky (56) and Koshik (51), had to settle for the short-term leasing of a succession of southern KwaZulu-Natal farms. This changed in 1992 when they bought their first farm in KwaZulu-Natal’s Sevenoaks area. It comprised 130ha, of which 60ha were irrigated. However, for various strategic reasons, they sold it in 1999 and again began leasing farms, this time in the province’s Tala Valley area, for fresh produce production.

“From 2005 to 2010 we leased 20ha of the highly productive Southfork farm in Tala Valley,” recalls Dicky, the operation’s marketing manager and principal financial planner.

“Our operation started doing well and this allowed us to build up enough capital to buy the 71ha Tegwaan Nest in the Baynesfield area in 2010. This is where we still farm.

“The Land and Agricultural Development Bank of South Africa played a vital role in providing finance for the purchase of the farm, as well as for our start-up production costs.”

Koshik, who manages the day-to-day farming operations with his father and assistant manager Offer Kapisa, says a priority was to rehabilitate the existing 50ha semi-permanent overhead sprinkler irrigation system and expand it to cover the entire farm. This was achieved rapidly, and now, by drawing water from the nearby Umlaas River with permission from the Umlaas Irrigation Board, all of Tegwaan Nest can be irrigated in a five-day cycle.