A Zimbabwean ecologist and farmer, Mr Allan Savory once said, “agriculture is not a crop production calling as popular belief holds; it is the production of food and fibre from the world’s land and waters”.
Mr Savory added, “without agriculture, it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, or any existing project in the country. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.”
This philosophy is true of Ms Keitumetse Kgautlhe (49), a female farmer who defied the odds by tilling land in the Barolong heartland to produce food and fibre.
“Farming is a calling like any other for both men and women, and for me it is more of a business than a time passing activity,” she said in an interview at her farm.
She said she started farming at a tender age with the support of her parents and even after her marriage she continued farming though it was only for subsistence purposes.
“Even after the death of my husband I gripped tightly to farming through thick and thin to support my children,” she said.
She said she got stuck with farming after initially doing a knitting course which she thought was going to improve her livelihood.
In 2011, she responded to an advert and in the end she was among those who won the tender on offer to get 227 hectares of land.
First she had to clear the land and during that year she only managed to clear 20 hectares and planted maize which was destroyed by baboons which were all over because the area had never been used for ploughing before.
“This did not deter me from fulfilling my dream as I knew that in each and every endeavour one undertakes there has to be some challenges which have to be faced head on; in the 2013 ploughing season I harvest 30 bags while I kept on clearing the other side of the field,” said the ever smiling Kgautlhe.
She said after clearing a bigger part of the field, she planted 154 of the 227 hectsres, but due to drought which was severe in 2014, she only got 14 bags which meant that 2014 was much better that the 2015 ploughing season.
Ms Kgautlhe said despite all the challenges, she went ahead and solicited a loan from the Citizen Enterpreneurial Development Agency (CEDA) and bought bigger and better farming machineries which she said made farming easy.
She went for training at LEA where they trained her on farm management and records keeping which opened her eyes to focus more on her job; she shared trained her staff in turn so that they appreciate that the work they do is of great importance.
Ms Kgautlhe said farming had taken a major change, from the use of cattle and moldboard ploughs to that of heavy machinery.
She said, with modern technology, no one should shun farming and think it belongs to old people; farming is now business about which young people musts be encouraged to venture into.
“Having been part of Batswana farmers who went to NAMPO agricultural show in Bothaville in South Africa courtesy of Botswana Agricultural Marketing Board (BAMB), we have learnt a lot at that show and we will share the experience with other farmers in our region,” she said.
She boasts of four tractors, weed sprayer and planters among others and said she had tasked her sons to take care of the equipment though she has two permanent tractor drivers while the other two are operated by her sons and herself if the need arises.