South Africa: Ocean View’s ‘kos gangsters’ fighting hunger with a flourishing food garden
The farm started producing and delivering vegetable boxes to households in Ocean View.
By Luke Daniel
News 24
Sept 4, 2023
Excerpt:
An urban farming training programme, started by Justin Bonello – South Africa’s celebrity chef of Cooked and The Ultimate Braai Master fame – empowered a team of Ocean View locals to create their own food garden. Evolving from Bonello’s Neighbourhood Farm organisation, which, at the time, already had a presence in the South Peninsula of Cape Town, the programme enlisted 21 interns.
“We got accepted into the programme. None of us knew about farming,” says Nicky Jacobs, farm manager at Ocean View Organics, who was part of the original cohort of interns hand-picked by Bonello.
Two months of “intensive training” reduced the cohort to just 10 remaining participants, five men and five women, who completed the year-long programme.
Jacobs said:
What you see here, everything was made by us. Planting, irrigation, the shade netting… no contractors, everything you see here is man-made with [our] hands.
This rugged determination paid off, and the farm was gifted to the community of Ocean View. Again, the cohort, who completed the training and were left in charge of the farm, was halved, with only five female farmers remaining.
The five are known as the “kos [food] gangsters”.
