From hairdresser to top farmer

By Lloyd Phillips

Zoliwe Nombewu was a runner-up in the 2024 Grain South Africa Potential Commercial Farmer of the Year competition. She has travelled a long and sometimes daunting journey to this point. Yet she remains adamant that she is far from finished.

What appears to be a common thread among some of the finalists and winners in Grain South Africa’s 2024 Farmer of the Year competition for smaller-scale farmers is that much of their childhood was spent helping one or both their parents to grow crops and raise livestock. Evidently this left an indelible impression because, even if there were years in adulthood that they spent outside of agriculture, these people ultimately returned to their farming roots.

Zoliwe Nombewu is a case in point. As a child she helped her father with his crops and livestock on communal land in the rural Eastern Cape. She then spent much of her initial adult life running a hair salon in the province’s Mthatha city. During this time Zoliwe met and married her husband, Daliwonga, who owned and operated a fleet of minibus taxis. 

“A few years before 2008, my salon began struggling financially. Around the same time, Daliwonga found that his taxis business was becoming too stressful. We wanted out as soon as possible. We decided that we would move back to my family’s communal farmland in Tsolo’s Gotyibeni district,” Zoliwe says.

“I would start growing and selling cabbages, spinach, potatoes and other fresh produce on 3,5 hectares there while Daliwonga would gradually sell off his taxis until he could join me full-time.”

In 2008, the Nombewus immediately bought a used Massey Ferguson 2085 tractor for clearing these arable hectares of bushes to prepare the soil for planting, and for general crop management practices. 

Very soon, other small-scale farmers in the Gotyibeni communal area began asking to hire the tractor and implements from Zoliwe and Daliwonga for preparing and managing their own croplands. Sensing an alternative business opportunity, Daliwonga bought three skorokoro tractors at low prices and repaired and resprayed them all by himself. Then he went full-time into the mechanisation contracting business for other small-scale farmers in the district.

Meanwhile, Zoliwe was achieving her own successes with her small-scale fresh produce farming enterprise. Eventually she was supplying a Spar in Mthatha and a clientele of informal bakkie traders.

Reassessing the future

By 2014, the Nombewus’ mechanisation contracting business – by now officially named Three Plee 5 Farming Services – was well established. It was even hired by the state’s then Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA) – now the Eastern Cape Rural Development Agency – to service many more smaller-scale farming operations. The Nombewus needed, and were able to buy, a brand-new fourth tractor to meet the demand.

“At around that time we realised two key things,” Zoliwe says. “One was that our contracts with the state were insecure and could be cancelled at any time. The second was that we now had the machinery and implements, like planters, rippers and disc harrows, to be able to expand our own crop farming.”

The local inkosi allocated the Nombewus an additional 65 hectares of arable land in the Gotyibeni Traditional Authority area. The couple aimed to add large-scale dryland yellow maize production to Zoliwe’s existing small-scale fresh produce enterprise. Instead of only being a service provider to the Eastern Cape government, the Nombewus also became part of the AsgiSA programme, which was designed to improve broad-based black economic empowerment.

AsgiSA supported the Nombewus’ start with inputs such as seed, fertiliser and crop-protection products.

“It was a very difficult first five years for us,” Zoliwe tells African Farming. “Even though our average annual rainfall is 700–800 ml, and our soils are loamy in some areas and have more clay in others, our yields were very variable. In fact, for our first two seasons our yellow maize crops nearly failed.

“With guidance from Grain SA and other experts, we discovered that our soils needed very important corrections, like liming. Our soils were very acidic and their fertility was low. To make things worse, the years 2014 to 2017 were when South Africa experienced a massive drought and there were big outbreaks of the fall armyworm crop pest. We were also hit hard by them.”

The Nombewus persevered with slow but sure improvements to their soil health. 

Then and now, Zoliwe mainly handles the farming management while Daliwonga is focused on the ongoing mechanisation contracting enterprise, which also services the couple’s own croplands as needs be.

Noting that the Nombewus were determined to make a success of their existing 65 ha of yellow maize production, Grain South Africa’s Phahama Grain Phakama farmer development programme began offering the couple intensive training on various important aspects of commercial grain farming, from the simplest to the more complex, such as the technicalities of how to calibrate sprayers. They also received training in financial management and on how to grow soya beans.

“Grain SA even took us to one of its Nampo Harvest Days at Bothaville in the Free State,” Zoliwe says. “We learnt lots there too.

“The 2019/20 summer was the first time that our yellow maize began generating decent profits.”

Potential for further growth

Using all their resources and hard-learnt skills, the Nombewus have subsequently grown their dryland yellow maize production. With the further support and permission of the local inkosi, they now have access to a total of 1 200 hectares of arable dryland at various locations in the Gotyibeni area. Currently, however, their finances only allow them to have 430 hectares under yellow maize, which is nevertheless a substantial enterprise. Furthermore, they are currently running their own trials of 15 ha each of soya beans and sunflowers. If one or both of these crops are successful, they will be incorporated into an annual summer rotation with the Nombewus’ yellow maize crops. Zoliwe and Daliwonga will gradually expand their grain and oilseed production as and when financial and material resources allow.

“We are growing part of our yellow maize under contract for a commodities trading company and the rest for an animal feed company. Both are in Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal,” Zoliwe says.

“They send trucks to collect the yellow maize from us. Until the trucks come, we store the grain here in grain dams.”

The weather extremes of the 2023/24 summer cropping season hit most South African grain farmers, including the Nombewus, hard. In these particularly difficult circumstances, the couple achieved an average of 4,2 tonnes/ha from their yellow maize. If all goes well during the current summer, Zoliwe and Daliwonga are hoping to harvest at least 6,5 tonnes/ha towards mid-2025.

Tips from the top

Zoliwe has learnt many valuable lessons during her journey towards becoming a commercial summer grain farmer. There will no doubt be many more lessons to come, but she is willing to share what she knows.

1. Do not be a remote or part-time farmer. You need to be directly involved in the fields so that you can see problems early and fix them before it is too late.
2. Always be curious and willing to learn. Get involved with other farmers, like in a study group, which you can establish yourself, so that you can learn from one another about things like new markets and how to manage fall army worm. Attend farmer information days even if it you have to pay to go. Being able to discuss problems with other farmers who understand your situation is very helpful, and they might even be able to give you solutions to problems.
3. Always be aware of the current and expected weather. You need to know this for your planning for planting, spraying and harvesting. Check as many weather forecasts as possible on TV and online to get a good idea of what to expect.
4. Get your mind right to accept that you need to spend money to be able to grow a crop. You need to pay for things like inputs, machinery and harvesting. Know from the start that farming is a risky business. Most of the time it has great rewards. But there will be times when you lose. Do not give up after only one bad season. Always keep some money from the good seasons to help carry you through after a bad season.
5. Try to spread risk by having different enterprises. We have our yellow maize. We have 45 beef cows and 250 ewes. We are doing the trials with soya beans and sunflowers. A farmer can also spread risk by adding value to their primary products before marketing. If our soya beans and sunflowers are successful, Daliwonga and I might even start processing our harvests into oils and animal feed.
6. If seasonal weather forecasts do not look good, rather plant different fields at different times. At least some of these fields should do okay if it turns out that the others were planted too early or too late.
7. The long-distance transport of grain can be very expensive. If the option is there, try to sell as much of your grain as possible locally.
8. If you do not have good grain storage facilities on your farm, get the grain off your farm straight away after harvesting. Keeping grain in poor on-farm storage can cause big quality losses from things like moisture, which causes rotting, and from weevils eating the grain. If anyone still wants to buy this damaged grain, they will pay you much less for it.
9. Daliwonga and I have bought a few temporary grain storage dams that can safely hold the grain until the trucks come to collect it. These storage dams are cheaper than permanent storage facilities, and they can be taken down, stored and then used again the next harvest season.
10. You must harvest maize when the grain on the cobs has 12% to 13% moisture content; 14% is too close to the threshold risk. You can lose a lot of money if the moisture content is not right.
11. Have a proper crop management programme in place before the production season starts. Every year, Daliwonga and I sit together and first look at all the seasonal weather forecasts we can find. Then we develop and plan our crop management programme around the expected weather for the season. 
12. Although we have learnt many dos and don’ts through personal experience, we still regularly have meetings with representatives and advisers from different companies. The people we work with know their products very well. They teach us about any new products and technologies that can maybe help us even more, and they respond to us very quickly if we have any problems on the farm.

Zoliwe and Daliwonga are in the increasingly larger-scale commercial grain and oilseed farming business for the long haul. They are well aware that their security of tenure on communal lands under traditional leadership is not guaranteed, but they’re not letting that deter them. If the opportunity ever arises, they may consider buying some of their very own farmland.

“We have two daughters and two sons who are almost all out of school,” Zoliwe says. “While growing up, they saw how their parents developed the farming business. They have seen how the business supported them, like us being able to send them to good schools.

“Our children learnt from us and are still learning from us about farming. They are already helping us on the farm. They know it is a good business to be in. Daliwonga and I are expecting that our whole family will eventually be fully involved in our family farming business.”

Enquiries: 

Zoliwe Nombewu, email zrhum1008@gmail.com

Eric Wiggill, national coordinator of Grain SA’s Phahama Grain Phakama farmer development programme, cell 082 620 0058, email eric@grainsa.co.za 

Watch: Interview with Zoliwe