Community farm's drive and discipline rewarded at last

Having suffered several setbacks in their efforts to make their agribusiness profitable, a group of hard-working land reform beneficiaries in KwaZulu-Natal at last got the help they needed from an agricultural transformation organisation. Lloyd Phillips reports on the Gugulethu community.

- Lloyd Phillips

Members of the approximately 42-member Gugulethu community in KwaZulu-Natal’s deep-rural Middelrus area are not easily deterred from achieving their collective goals.

After receiving a 345ha farm in 2007 as part of South Africa’s land restitution program, the community experienced one disappointment after another in its efforts to operate a profitable commercial farming business. But its members never gave up and, today, with the help of the non-profit, private sector Upper Midlands Agricultural Transformation Initiative (UMATI), this vision is on the way to being realized.

A FARM, BUT NO SUPPORT

The Gugulethu Community Trust (GCT) owns Gugulethu Farm on behalf of the community’s members. GCT chairperson Bheki Nene, together with fellow committee members Nathi Nene, Zakhele Shezi, and Sebenzile Dladla, manage the farm’s day-to-day operations.

Bheki says that Gugulethu Farm’s previous owners grew seed and commercial potatoes, yellow maize and green mealies, and the farm came with equipment and infrastructure such as tractors, irrigation, sheds, a mechanised potato sorting system, cold storage rooms and a small maize mill.

“The problem was that our community had no money for production inputs when the government bought the farm for us,” he explains.

With limited government support to get the GCT’s commercial crop production started, the community decided to lease the farm to a local commercial farmer until they could save enough of the rental income to pay for their production inputs.