Eben Engelbrecth
Thabiso Tlou counts as one of the emerging farmers who are making a success at a time when we all too often hear of small farmers stuffing up, despite millions of Rand in government assistance.
Although he is only 23, he operates a thriving tomato farm just outside Polokwane, on the Dendron road. He rents the 240 hectare farm from the Polokwane Municipality and subjects himself willingly to the mentorship of the ANC structures set up to train emerging farmers.
Tlou has been on the farm since 2008. When he first arrived there, it was just an undeveloped piece of land, overgrown with weeds and invader bush. With the help of mentors and supervisors, many of them from the established commercial farming and industrial sector, he now has 20 hectares under tomatoes, 2 under butternut, 6 under cabbage and a little maize for his workers. He also owns his own tractor, two dish ploughs, a two-ton truck, a bakkie, 20 boreholes and a farmstead.
His mainstay production is export tomatoes for Mozambique. The buyer is a firm in Maputo, who sends a truck to his farm at the end of every growing cycle, to load 300 crates of tomatoes at R45 per crate. Given the abundance of water, Tlou grows as many as six crops a year. The income derived he ploughs back into the land by paying his workers a living wage and investing the rest in expansion. He hopes to double his area of arable land and increase his tomato crop threefold. He is counting on help from donors and mentors to eventually have more than half of the farm under drip irrigation. Young Tlou grew up, never thinking he would one day become a farmer. Deep in his soul he is a political animal, still a little bitter that his father was forced to work on farms while in exile in Zimbabwe and Zambia. But as things turned out, he’s doing better at farming than politics.
Tlou has many people he wishes to thank for the help they have given him. People like his personal mentor, Ms Tanya Dimitrova of Tractor & Farming Equipment Limpopo, an ANC activist hell bent on making the emerging farmer thing work and produce food for a hungry nation and an even hungrier continent. He’s also grateful to a couple of industrial heavyweights who came to his assistance when he needed it most, people like Messrs Jannie van Waveren, Andrew Smit and Willie Burger.
Tlou is a shining example of a beginner who made it against all odds, because he was willing to work hard. Very hard. Hard work seems to be the key word here, for in the mind of the white populace, black farmers fail in their efforts "because they are lazy." Although this can certainly not be a true reflection of reality, it is nonetheless the prevailing perception. It takes somebody like Tlou to change that attitude and prove that black guys can farm. All they need is teaching, a little help, more understanding and less criticism.