A Model For Agricultural Extension

Agriculture is rife with complaints that extension services are poor, with this blamed as a key factor in many failed farmer-development initiatives. However, William Gillepsie and Felicity Mitchell, authors of a manual on the training of extension services, are showing how proper skills development is setting emerging farmers on the road to success. Lloyd Phillips reports.

- Lloyd Phillips

Driving through the hilly and expansive traditional authority areas within the sugar cane supply area of Illovo Sugar’s Noodsberg Sugar Mill in KwaZuluNatal (KZN), one cannot help but notice the many small fields of this crop that collectively form an eye-pleasing mosaic of green.

According to those in the know, a decade ago these areas were dominated by often-struggling subsistence crops, such as maize and dry beans, used to supplement the meagre meals of poor households kept going by social welfare grants.

Mathombi Duma, one of the tens of thousands of low-income residents in these areas, says that until about six years ago, she and her husband, Sibonelo, would annually scrape together whatever money they could to grow up to 2ha of green mealies for home consumption and for sale within their local community.

“It cost us a lot of money to grow these mealies and then we’d often find we couldn’t sell all of our harvest because the local market wasn’t big enough. Sometimes, people would steal our mealies, or livestock from the local community would get onto our lands and eat the maize plants and cobs. We lost a great deal of money,” recalls Duma.

A NEW OPPORTUNITY

In 2014, the couple learned that in order to operate efficiently, Noodsberg Sugar Mill needed substantially more deliveries than it could obtain from its established large-scale sugar cane suppliers. (The mill can crush 6 000t of sugar cane daily.)

This news was a turning point for the Dumas. Once again, the couple scrounged what money they could and bought enough seed cane from a local large-scale sugar cane farmer to plant their first crop. Like a number of other smallholder farmers in the area, they initially chose to establish and manage their few hectares of dryland sugar cane largely on their own.