22 February 2024
Humour is often described as South Africans’ way of coping with the pressure, problems and bad news in the country. More than 400 conference delegates learned that resilience depends on something much deeper than just laughter.
It wasn’t even lunchtime and speakers had filled a hall with over 400 conference delegates at Nampopark outside Bothaville, making them laugh, cry and clap along to the familiar song Jerusalema.
It was day one of the two-day Solutions for Rural South Africa conference hosted by Landbouweekblad, African Farming’s sister publication, and Senwes, and it was filled with the stories of hope that are the golden thread binding communities all over the country.
Chris Burgess, editor of Landbouweekblad, began the day by explaining why the publication hosts the event. “For over a century, we’ve been telling the stories of rural South Africa. What happens in rural South Africa is a deep concern for us,” he said.
“But the one thing about rural South Africa is the communities that pitch in and want to make things right. Lying down won’t help. Rural South Africa’s asset is its people. They bring us closer to the land we want.”
In turn, Francois Strydom, CEO of Senwes, said: “This is Bela-Bela 2.1. Let’s take back what’s ours. The world doesn’t know what we know. They eat what they eat because our rural communities don’t give up.”
A kitchen table
The first speaker, Deli-Co CEO Hendri Truter, started where most people’s days end – at the kitchen table. It was there, on their farm in Riebeek-Kasteel, that the Truters started processing meat in 1993 to make sausage and ground beef which they sold to the community from a bakkie and cart.
Today, Deli-Co provides 700 jobs “and in the future we aim to provide jobs for more than 1,000 people”, said Truter.
“If you create hope, you also create happiness, and if you don’t participate in the change around you, you will ultimately become a victim of that change. Let’s build through agriculture.”
An inspired Thabo van Zyl, one of the Free State’s leading farmers and a director of Senwes, then told the story of Itokisetseng Combined School in Wesselsbron. Since 2014, he and his wife, Ninette, have worked with Senwes’ Thobo Trust to promote the rural school.
Today, it has 350 students and 16 full-time teachers. A vegetable garden was established in 2018 and survived the following year’s dry El Niño season with the help of water from Van Zyl’s neighbours. Today, the garden supplies cabbages and tomatoes to the Welkom fresh produce market. All the money raised goes directly to the Thobo Trust, which manages it for the school.
With the theme of fresh produce still in mind, Jaco Oosthuizen, CEO of the RSA group, told the story of the Mooketsi market in Limpopo. It started in 2014 as a modest outlet for second-rate tomatoes but is now a beacon of success that creates significant wealth locally and in the region.
Oosthuizen said there are now 16 regional markets nationwide, with more in the pipeline. Farmers who trade their products at these markets earned over R1 billion last year and about 155 million kilograms of fresh produce were sold.
‘The police knew where I was’
Mthunzi Ntutela, a communal sheep farmer from the Eastern Cape who formed a partnership with Marius Pienaar, a sheep farmer from De Aar, said he remembers informing the police before visiting Pienaar on the farm for the first time because he was unsure how the meeting would go. The two men began talking after Ntutela expressed frustration on Facebook about the quality of animals available to communal farmers at auctions.
“He kept video-calling his friends the whole time and showing them how freely he could move around my house during his visit. It was so strange for him,” Pienaar said.
Through the partnership, Ntutela got in touch with John Miller, a cattle and wool farmer from Cathcart in the Eastern Cape, who became a reliable supplier of sheep for him. With the help of Pienaar and support from Miller and BKB, Ntutela started the project Genetic Improvement on Communal Land for Commercialisation to improve his herd’s genetic properties.
“Why do we do what we do? We don’t know; we just do it,” Pienaar said. “This is a story to tell. Oh, this is a story to tell,” Ntutela remarked enthusiastically.
