Chronicle Editor
Amanda Mlevu, Sunday News Reporter
A farmer in Umguza District in Matabeleland North Province, Mrs Shalene Mabharani (58) is basking in the glory of her successful agricultural venture after benefiting from the land redistribution programme that gifted her with a nine hectare A2 farm.
Through her farming venture, she has been of service to the community in Umguza and beyond where she is supplying fresh farm produce in the form of potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages and other vegetables to the market in Bulawayo while also serving travellers along the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls Road.
In the community she is a known provider not only of affordable farm produce but of employment to a number of families. At the peak of her farming season, she employs not less than 10 people to help her out on the farm.
Mrs Mabharani has not just treated the land as a tangible heritage but transformed it into a means of production and a business to support her family after having been widowed 18 years ago when she was 39 years old.
“I got the place to farm through the land reform programme and got an A2 farm designed for irrigation late in 2003. There was no infrastructure and I had to ensure that I invest. I had set my sights on farming as a business and I had to work hard so that I buy the equipment and start farming,” said Mrs Mabharani.
She said she took the risk of leaving her job in the civil service to focus on her farm, something she said a lot of people didn’t understand then.
“I took a leap of faith and left my job in the civil service to concentrate my energy on my farming venture. I wanted to be hands-on, to be there and to see things done in the way I wanted them to be. I therefore realised that I was not going to achieve it if I had continued working. It was going to take some of my time and I didn’t want that divided attention,” she said.
She added that she grew up in a communal farming environment and it was easy for her as she was no stranger to some of the things that farming requires.
“I was raised in a communal farming environment so I basically had the passion to be a farmer, then after secondary school I took a risk and just decided to go for it and I trained as an agriculturalist,” said Mrs Mabharani.
She is the true definition of Jim Rohn philosophy when he said, “If you really want to do something you’ll find a way, if you don’t, you will find an excuse.”
Mrs Mabharani indeed found a way and pursued her dream without thinking twice.
She is a determined and self-made woman who grew up in Masvingo District and has been doing everything on the farm on her own.
She stands tall as one of the women in farming success stories and said she had been able to develop her farm through mechanisation.
Her nine-hectare farm has seven hectares under irrigation and her crops include potatoes, butternut, cabbage, okra, marrows, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons and maize.
“As for funding, I started with small quantities of broilers and layers and kept on growing on these. In 2016 I retired from my work as a civil servant and used my benefits to drill a borehole, electricity infrastructure and connection as well as starting this irrigation.”
She said her future plans include an increased supply of fresh farm produce to the Bulawayo market throughout the year.
“I also intend to establish an orchard designed to sell various fruits throughout the year as well as rearing sheep and goats, rabbits, poultry and fishery,” she said.
She thanked the Government for embarking on the land reform programme which distributed large tracts of land that was in the hands of a few white farmers to the black majority.
The Government has also continued to support farmers through various initiatives such as input distribution and easy access to loans as the country’s economy is majorly agro-based and the aim is that the continued development of farming will feed into the national economy and accelerate the achievement of an upper middle-income economy by 2030.
Bongani Ndlovu