Lulama Jim of the Masicendani garden picks carrots for Harvest of HopeIf you are of a certain background, you are probably used to buying your vegetables cleaned, washed and chopped, pre-packaged and beautiful from Pick n’ Pay and Woolworths. Many of us want this kind of convenience. However this recent shift in consumer culture means that as a race, we have become lazier, especially in terms of our food production. This kind of production process is what is threatening our global food security. According to Abalimi Bezekhaya project facilitator Rob Small, the answer lies in community micro farming. Small believes that South Africa produces less than 25% of its food needs. He also said that “50% of the so called homelands are now vacant, as people are drawn to the cities and we have less and less people producing.”

Rob Small gave a tour of one of the community gardens that is part of the Abalimi program . Abalimi Bezekhaya has now been going for 28 years and has focused on poverty alleviation, sustainability and food security. This non profit organisation assists in helping neglected communities to grow their own healthy organic vegetables. In 2008 they launched the Harvest of Hope box scheme and have come to show that “under-educated, unemployable South Africans can have healthy lives with tiny pieces of land, in the worst possible conditions can have abundant healthy food and a decent income using their own initiative.”

The Masicendani garden

Abalimi supports between 1500 and 3000 micro-farmers every year at a cost of around R 100 a month per farmer, which covers all operational costs, including the supply of resources such as fertiliser, seed, seedlings, advice, free training and on-site technical support as well as the development and marketing of the produce in the pack shed.

“Just 500 meters square is enough to create an economically viable micro-farming project,” according to Small. These farmers are doing just that. Abalimi Bhezekhaya uses the sustainable development chain co-developed by Small, which means that the people in the project pass through the following four stages:

The survival phase: In this phase the micro farm produces food for the farmers' own consumption, with little sold. What is sold pays for household necessities. Often any surplus is shared with friends.

Phillipina Ndamane washing carrots before they go to the packshed

The subsistence phase: The produce is seasonally grown for own consumption but with a regular seasonal surplus, which is sold to bring income into the home. It is at this stage that saving and re-investment into the garden starts.

The livelihood phase: This is a semi commercial phase. At this stage 50% of what is grown is used for own and community consumption and the rest is sold on a regular basis year round to bring in a reliable income of between R500-R3000 per farmer/month after costs. At this stage production is moderately intensive. Re-investment occurs and profit margins will increase. This is the stage that most micro-farmers are predicted to settle at since it provides abundant cheap healthy fresh food, sufficient regular money income and plenty of spare time to organize to do many other things which generate huge social good - like look after children and the aged, feed and care for the hungry and sick. And since most of the micro farmers are mothers and grandmothers, this is exactly what they do.

The last phase is to become full commercial, where everything is sold. None of the Abalimi micro-farmers have entered this stage yet but some (mostly the men) are aiming there, so there is hope that they may one day do so. At Commercial stage social benefits decrease drastically while the money benefits only a few people.

There are twenty (out of nearly 100) gardens that are at the livelihood stage, of which Harvest of Hope has contracts with 15 gardens. The other five will be taken on once they have proved that they can sustain production, while the 80 others are still at subsistence stage.

Nancy Witbooi picking beetroot

I visited the Masicendani ("we try") garden. This garden is the product of the hard work of a group of six women including Phillipina Ndamane, Lulama Jim and Nancy Witbooi. They have a plot that is about 5000 meters behind the Fezeka Municipal offices. In 2007, this group of women won R 13 000 from the Department of Agriculture for being the best Female Farmer/s or the Year. All the women at Masicendani are older than 50 years. In general, it is older women who lead the micro-farming movement, but there are increasing numbers of younger mothers coming in, and men, since serious money making has become a reality and due to the ongoing unemployment and job shedding, while GDP grows.

The produce from these gardens is sold in the organic vegetable box schemes through the Harvest of Hope scheme. The bigger boxes are sold for R 95 each, so by buying one box; you can just about be funding the full support and development of one farmer for a month. Otherwise you can purchase the smaller “box” which is a bag of vegetables that is enough for four people for R 65. Boxes are delivered once a week on a Tuesday.

Abalimi Bezekhaya is considered to be a successful scheme throughout Africa according to Rob Small; and other organisations are coming to see how it works. It is a cost effective and efficient scheme, with a guaranteed market for the farmers to supply their vegetables to.

Nancy Witbooi triming up beetroot

Nancy Witbooi, who works in the Macitendai garden, told me the following: “I like to help here in the garden, as the work makes our bodies’ strong.” Her fellow farmer, Lulama Jim who started in January, said “the garden means a lot to me. I have learnt a lot about how to grow crops and I love watching the plants grow.” The food from the garden helps her to feed her two sons and her daughter.

The packing shed is based at the Philipi Developmental Node. This is where the vegetables from farmers are once again checked for quality and washed and packed. On the day I went, there were 193 boxes of vegetables requested.

In each of the bigger boxes, you will have eleven types of mixed vegetables. They also sometimes include eggs and mushrooms from small farmers outside the township, all for R 95 a week. One of their customers is Rosemary, who was along on the tour, and commented that “as a family of four, eating four vegetarian meals a week, we struggle to get through all the veg, so they are really generous”.

The Harvest of Hope Packshed

The vegetables are washed and checked for quality before being packed and sent off to the collection points. All of this is done under the watchful eye of Operations Manager and leading micro-farmer Christine Tenjiwe Kaba, who has been with Abalimi for over twenty years. The vegetables are then collected by the customers at the collection points. At this stage it has usually been less than six hours since the vegetables were in the ground, so your vegetables cannot get any fresher than that unless you pick them yourself outside your back door!

If you wish to order vegetables through the Harvest of Hope you can do so here.

To find out more about Abalimi Bezekhaya you can visit their website.

If you want to make a tax-free donation to the work of Abalimi Bezekhaya , you can do it through the Farm and Garden National Trust www.farmgardentrust.org

For an account of our first visit to Abalimi Bhezekhaya see here