Food for Mzansi's article on Nxazonke: Circles of Urban Agriculture Enterprise Development

Dear All

Food for Mzansi wrote an article on my new book and p-ls see it here:

https://www.foodformzansi.co.za/new-book-challenges-how-sa-develops-urban-farmers/

I sent along my own article for them to conbsider, and they published their synnopsis of the book.

My submission to them is available below:

Nxazonke: Urban Agriculture Enterprise Development: A new book for urban farmers

Naudé Malan

HER Research and Development

naudemalan@gmail.com 

iZindaba Zokudla was a research project at the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg. I developed this project with colleagues at the UJ, initially as a farmer-student participatory technology development project in 2013, but it soon became a regular event for urban farmers and their stakeholders at the UJ Soweto Campus until the end of 2025. This “public innovation laboratory” was developed to assist urban farmers in a very practical way, by presenting and workshopping agricultural technologies, production methods, academic studies, retail opportunities, and offers of support, amongst others. I also drew on “social theory” in strategically managing and facilitating this event, and used such critical theory to structure relations with farmers and others, initially the NGO Slow Food whom we partnered with for the Slow Food Eat-Ins in 2016 and 2017. 

However, in working with urban and other small farmers, I encountered many others and I soon realised that we often assist them in wrong ways. At the bottom of our efforts was an incomplete strategy: no one even conceptualised what would it take to enable them to be profitable? What is necessary for a small agricultural enterprise to become profitable and deliver real value to the farmer and customers? What could this look like in South Africa, with its peculiar patterns of urban settlement? We need to singularly focus on these questions if we are to help small and urban farmers, and I do not find them answered satisfactorily in South Africa, and hence, I wrote the book. The book is available as a free download at: https://ujonlinepress.uj.ac.za/index.php/ujp/catalog/book/294.

Surrounding these kinds of questions about agricultural change in South Africa, sit many concerns, from equity and redress to economic development, sustainability, food security and many more, and these could obscure, or help, our search for answers. It seems to me that we need to develop urban and small farmers as a singular problem, before we tie our assistance for them to other objectives and aims. To achieve these laudable but ancillary aims, we need to find a way where attaining these are also in the farmers best interest: to be a farmer who produces more with less. Ecological and biological production, I argue in the book, is important for more reasons than merely its sustainability. The sequencing and systematic ordering of biological processes (animals, crops of all kinds, and their wastes) on the farm – Nxazonke –creates cycles of resource use and repurposing, which delivers product at certain points in these cycles. They are productive. These cycles benefit from investments in soils, infrastructure, species and processes, and liberates a small farmer as they have their own inherent productivity. At any one point in such multifaceted systems, something is being produced that can be sold, from food, to waste, to compost, to worms, to animals, to fertilisers.

The path to commercialisation or “success” for a small or urban farmer is a different path than what a commercial farmer in a rural area will take. We often try to assist them all in the same ways, and I realised this has to change. One day, in Alexandra, I met someone who complained about small farmers and the lack of progress in taking them to commercialisation. When he asked me what I was doing there he exclaimed: “You work with small farmers? Nothing works for them!”. I replied: “it is because you try to develop them in the wrong way!” In this journey, I engaged with this puzzle: why do small farmers not get ahead? What is missing to make this proposition work?

In the book, I expressly analyse the market opportunity urban and small farmers face, and this grounds the recommendations. Urban and small farmers have certain advantages in the current food system. Urban and small farmer development should be established on a commercially viable footing, and this will condition much of our thinking and acting in this sector. This footing must be appropriate to a context of high potential sales of kitchen vegetables and small animals, and on-site processed products. Farmers do not have capital but can organise access to land. Urban areas are also replete with waste that can be processed to composts and other fertilisers, or recycled. Reclaimers are already at work, and such opportunities can be further adapted by urban farmers. In the book I detail how it would be possible to produce sufficient quantities of food at low enough cost to make the effort worthwhile. Urban and small farmers can also deliver, through the independent retail system in South Africa – their own Spaza shops, higher quality produce than supermarkets, mainly due to freshness. These can be sold at lower prices than supermarkets provided a suitable production strategy can be found. Urban and small farmers can produce food by metabolising and repurposing wastes as biological agricultural inputs, and in this way enhance their competitiveness. They can also create sophisticated marketing and retail systems on social media, in addition to developing their own technology.

In the academic assessments of small farmer development, we find those who like to push them to commercialisation, whist others have tried to understand why it is so difficult for a new, urban or rural, farmer to adopt the means and techniques of “modern” food production. Currently, farmers are encouraged to adopt either GMO or Hybrid seeds, mechanisation, chemical regimes, and are also encouraged to sell on the open market, often at Fresh Produce Markets.

The reason this strategy is failing is not hard to see, and the difficulties of adopting these systems, as a whole, is leading to an agricultural disengagement in rural areas of South Africa. Modern seeds, both GMO and Hybrids are expensive, although productive – should you be able to implement all of the technologies and means that accompany it. Open pollinated seeds may deliver lower yields but can be saved again and could thus lower cost to commercial entry. They may be a better business proposition for small farmers. We do not see this. Mechanisation is expensive and only appropriate and profitable if you have more than say, a few (preferably 400) hectares of land to plant. Chemicals may be effective but leave impacts in its wake. Next year the pests may be even more pernicious, and the chemicals leave the soil barren. Behind this strategy, understandably, lie bulk sales. Given the inequality between small farmers and large landholders, small farmer involvement in bulk sales will inevitably give the small farmer a price that only a large farmer can accept. The only solution to this problem is if the farmer engages in high value retail sales themselves.

These modern strategies make sense in a context of ample land and sufficient capital. However, are these appropriate to the contexts and conditions small and urban farmers face in South Africa? In some of my writings I have advocated for a “liberation agriculture” (akin to a liberation theology we saw in Latin America in the 1960s. see: https://www.izindabazokudla.com/post/the-idea-of-a-liberation-agriculture-and-the-rise-of-a-new-food-system). I liberally adapted these ideas to agriculture. I realised we need to develop an agricultural system for small and urban farmers that would lower their capital expenditures significantly (close to Zero, as the Zero Budget Natural Farming movement advocates for. See https://media.un.org/avlibrary/en/asset/b613/b6138821379001). Would it be possible to sell at highest retail price but keep production costs near zero? This seemed to me a viable way to approach small farmer development. Along the way I also realised only biological production means, drawing on urban and other wastes, could do this for small and urban farmers. This formed a neat complement to deep trenches and also suggested to me that we could integrate a waste harvesting system with urban food sales, and this was a great invention that farmers immediately appropriated and enhanced. I one day found several farmers harvesting human urine and processing this to a liquid fertiliser.

I was also aware that many have indeed searched and advocated for more appropriate technologies, and production means for small farmers. For instance, Amanzi for Food (part of the Water Research Commission, https://amanziforfood.co.za/holding/) set out how to build deep trench gardens. I also noted, whist in a session at the ARC, a report on deep trench gardens that led to a 300% yield increase over conventional agriculture. The NGO “Practical Action” (https://practicalaction.org/) advocates for “intermediate and appropriate technology” and impressed on me the many intermediate approaches, lower than high tech, but more effective than “low tech” that are useful for small farmers (think “biogas”) and I wondered why these are not mainstream in South Africa. From this inspiration birthed the idea of not only “supercharging” deep trenches with animal bones and liquid manures, but also to integrate these trenches with swales and contours from permaculture design. From this, a next insight emerged: farmers often do not integrate, or converge their technologies, or leave them out of the picture. Technologies need to be stacked on top of each other so efforts and productivity can be multiplied. A deep trench can be enhanced by mulching, but building a tunnel over the trench and the mulch will multiply efforts and production even more. It would also benefit from an irrigation system, seeing so much effort is made in building it. Why stop here, why not also add companion plants, liquid manure and pollination in this system? Why do we not expose small and urban farmers to a whole suite of technologies that have the potential to transform their position in society and in the agricultural system?

We need to do everything possible to enable small and urban farmers to get ahead. I am often astounded by the meagre support many NGOs deliver, and in most cases, this support is diluted by additional objectives that stem from elsewhere. Many who work in the field, never see the solution, because they “look too low” for answers. Everyone want such small and urban farmers to produce sustainably, but this is the end and not the means of development for them. Why not integrate the concerns of the ecology explicitly in the production means, so that we achieve both sustainability and economic development at the same time? We forget, the development goals we have, lie at the end of the process, but there may be very many means of achieving them. A deep trench does all of this at once! If we want to help small and urban farmers we need to help them for their own sake and focus on what they need to produce good food at lower than established costs!

A last piece of the puzzle also emerged, and it was right in front of my eyes. Social media makes possible a sophisticated marketing and sales strategy. These systems can be manipulated by farmers to reach the immediate community around their farms. Sales and services can be advertised, and it could also play a part in community education about good food. Farmers can also organise workshops at their farms where they can show people how deep trenches and accompanying technologies produces good food. Farmers can organise training in agriculture, for food, on their farms, and enable others to also produce. In this way, farmers can develop a seed library for them, sell seedlings and composts, and market food effectively, better than supermarkets. Bulk selling, by buying say potatoes in bulk, and breaking this into smaller quantities can be experimented with at a “shop” and farmers should build these at their farms, and partner with a shopkeeper in this regard. Farmers can also harvest wastes, for a 30% discount on food, and use these in the next season’s deep trench so that next season will see higher production. Farmers can explain to their customers how the soil works and regenerates nutrients for food. Farmers can show customers how they can “lower the cost of their own food purchases through the repurposing and transformation of waste”. I articulated this as the Unique Value Proposition urban farmers can consider, as this is the keyway they can beat the market and supermarkets, in both cost, convenience, and sustainability.

In the book you will find recommendations on production, as a list of “essential technologies” that will enable a farmer to choose themselves what is most appropriate to the state of their farms. I also elaborate on how to set up a waste exchange mechanism at the farm. The costs of harvesting waste from customers (R 5 discount on a R 15 bunch of spinach for a 20-litre bucket of biological waste) is on par with the cost of compost on the open market. – roughly R1 per kg. Waste exchanges give the poorest the opportunity to exchange waste for food. Farmers save the opportunity costs of searching and acquiring these materials. Recyclables can also be harvested and sold for cash to a reclaimer, making money available for strategic inputs.

Waste harvesting can also be enhanced by the processing of wastes into composts, liquid manures, and some waste, like old appliances, can be fixed on site by a partner entrepreneur. The farm can become a community centre, where select services are made available for the community, and this is but an extension of informal sector activity. The use of social media complements all the above and enables a tightly controlled enterprise to be developed.

In my work, I realised that I need to assist at least one farmer to implement these recommendations. It was a better proposition than spreading all my assistance to everyone, where I would run the danger of not assisting anyone. Greg and Miems Mkhize, of Siyoyisile Indlala farm, were well known to me, and I made it a point to help them to implement as many of these recommendations as possible. In all cases, they went way beyond what I recommended, and they were a true inspiration and support for me in writing this book. Many of the technologies I speak about in the book are implemented on this farm. You can visit this farm in Protea Glen anytime (tours are possible by prior arrangement) but you can also see what they are doing on their media pages:  https://www.instagram.com/siyoyisileindlala/; https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090067930435.

This book wants us to re-examine what we have always believed a farmer should do. Currently, we are confronted by the limits of our current agricultural development strategies. Continuing as we have always done will risk an unstable climate that will undermine everything else we are doing. Our achievements, and they are notable in social justice, in cultural development, technological progress and in conservation are all at risk. Small and urban farmer development presents us with new opportunities to reorient agriculture, and being marginalised and unusual, may represent a sterling opportunity to build a new agricultural system slowly from the bottom up. I expressly did not write the book for academics and researchers, but for farmers. Academics and researchers need to follow where farmers lead. I know there are some who have adopted these ideas, and now we need to extend this, and validate what has been proposed. This is the start of a journey I cannot walk alone. #PhambiliBalimi