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South Africa: Story of a (downtown) African farm

Refiloe Molefe proudly displays the fruits of her labour. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

The food that is grown there has fed children, homeless people and, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, has supplied the soup kitchens set up by the Makers Valley Partnership.

By Mark Heywood
Daily Maverick
7 March 2021

Excerpt:

Molefe went to the City of Johannesburg and the Gauteng Department of Agricultural Development to see if they could help. They told her about an inner city farm that they had started in 2006 on an old bowling green so that “no one should go to bed hungry”. But they warned her that others had tried and failed to make it work: “I would fail like the others, they told me.” But she was determined to try.

Once she had started work on the farm, local crèches took over looking after the children and she concentrated her efforts on the farm. She won several competitions and used the prize money to buy tools and put in taps. She also started to engage the assistance of local youth with the hard labour of watering, digging and tending to the farm.

Molefe says she found she had a sixth sense for farming. “Farming is like taking care of a child”, she says – and she knew all about taking care of children. But, she admits, she knew little about its theory or science, so she approached the Agricultural Sector Education and Training Authority and enrolled in classes on plant production.

“Being in class opened my eyes,” she said. “It taught me to test the pH level of the soils and about hard-to-pronounce terms like photosynthesis. I had called it ‘natural farming’, but then I learnt that what I was doing was called organic farming.”

Read the complete article here.