Young female farmers visit mega farm to learn the chicken trade
Two enterprising, young, female farmers, recently visited Lund Farms outside the city to gather insight into the operations of a mega chicken farming operation and to enhance their vision.
POLOKWANE – Mahlatse Matakane and Tshokolo Selolo were welcomed by Lund Farms General Manager, Peter Bartlet, who took the time to answer all their questions.
Matakane (23) is the child of a farm worker who spent her holidays alongside her mother. When she finished high school, her mother wanted her to study but she asked for one year off to farm, and once she harvested her first crop of tomatoes, peppers, cabbage and sweet potatoes, that dream was set aside for a new dream of farming.
Her biggest challenge is that she is still leasing a farm at Bristol, between Vivo and Louis Trichardt and wants to own her own land one day. The recent cyclone Eloise affected her harvest of tomatoes, where she lost half of her crop and she still needs a bakkie or small truck for deliveries. Without her own vehicle, her deliveries are at times, late, which creates more problems for her, she explained.
Matakane was chosen from over 2 000 applications for the national SAB Foundation Tholoana Programme that is managed by Fetola, which specialises in enterprise development. According to Mahlatse, it boasts a close to 90% success rate after only five years with entrepreneurs completing the programme. “For the first 18 months of their journey, we have access to a local mentor who supports and helps put systems in place to ensure sustainability. The programme also covers 12 days of training, ranging from vision setting, costing and pricing, finance, sales and marketing, colour accounting and people management,” Matakane explained. She added that one of the key deliverables it entrenches from the first month, is monthly financial reporting. “We see that so many entrepreneurs start because they have a passion for a field, but will often fail because of the lack of systems in place to monitor their business,” she reckoned.
Selolo (29), founded TNJ Chicken’s in 2016 with the vision of uplifting the youth and growing employment numbers in her community. Together with her team, she is rapidly paving the way for TNJ Chicken’s to have a national footprint.
TNJ Chicken’s is a small scale farm, based in the Ga-Selolo village, outside Polokwane, that grows and sells broiler chickens and eggs.
“We rear chickens from day-old chicks and feed them with high-quality feed until they’re ready to be processed and delivered to our customers,” Selolo explained, and added that the farm currently has three houses accommodating 1 000 chickens each and that she plans to add more hatcheries and an abattoir in the near future.
“Surviving as a small scale farmer is made difficult by escalating input costs like the price of chicken feed, low grade of chicks available and leads to losses being incurred by the farmer, lack of infrastructure, lack of skilled workers available. Tshokolo says that the requirement for constant marketing is often hard and the fact that as an emerging farmer she is reliant on the informal market which is ever changing. I currently deliver to a spaza shop which may not be around in a few months’ time,” she said.
