The month of August is known as a women’s month in South Africa, this is to pay tribute to the heroines who marched to the Union Buildings on 09 August 1956 to protest against the law of pass.
This year, the Eastern Cape Department of Rural Development and Agrarian Reform (DRDAR) is celebrating women who are in agriculture, by funding and empowering them. Farming can be very challenging especially now that South Africa is facing economical and climate issues, the DRDAR makes all efforts to support and fund upcoming farmers and women who are in agriculture and other development programs.
Nomgcobo Makhamandela from Middledrift is a vegetable producer and supplies nearby supermarkets with her vegetable production, she also works with other farmers from Zanyokwe Irrigation Scheme. They grow corn, cabbage, spinach and butternut. Nomgcobo emphasizes the importance of finding a market before going to the field and planting crops. She said this has cost them because in the past because they would not find customers to buy their production.
“The reason why we look for a market before planting our vegetables is to avoid waste. In the past we used to plant crops and start to look for a market when we have already haversted our production, that affected us badly because most of our vegetables would be damaged if we could not find customers,” said Nomgcobo.
Nomgcobo Makhamandela further explained, “We plant the crops with the intentions to sell, we also supply Spar in Middledrift with spinach and cabbage. We also conduct a thorough inspection on our production before supplying the markets so that we won’t drop prices and even loose business deals.”
Another vegetable producer is Nolitha Msutu from Alfred Nzo District Municipality. Nolitha focuses more on producing sweet potatoes and use the sweet potato to make juice and fried chips. She produces two types of sweet potato cultivars, which are reddish and orange flesh sweet potatoes.
“My favourite orange flesh sweet potato, because with it we are able make a lot of other products like jam, chutney, purity, fried chips and juice. We only add natural presevetives to our juice, we cook the sweet potato and then add lemon juice and sugar.”
