 everybody, and welcome to the Private Property Farming podcast. My name is Mbali Nwaka, and I'm happy to be back onto the podcast once again, introducing yet another entrepreneur, agripreneur or farmer just in the agri sector. And today we're speaking to a fellow female farmer, as I'm always biased to female farmers, because I think we need to have a lot more female farmers in this industry. And it's always great to engage with another female farmer just to understand their journey, and how they're making success in this industry. And today's topic is all about is agriculture the answer in solving the unemployment issue around youth in our country? And the lady we're going to be speaking to, and her name is Norma Tamba, just by the way, she's going to just unpack this topic with us, share a little bit of our story, and maybe just dive into some critical issues and how we can solve the youth unemployment crisis in South Africa. So joined by me today is Norma Tamba-Sibanda, and she's a farmer and founder of NISC Farms based in Pretoria. If you have any questions for her, please feel free to comment, like, and share this podcast. If you find it valuable, and obviously share it not only to individuals that have a keen interest in agri, but also share to your social media so that we could spread the word around the wonderful things that young people are doing in the space, the solutions that we are coming up with just to curb certain challenges that exist in the industry, and always, always subscribe to this farming podcast right here on the Private Property YouTube channel. Let's welcome Norma Tamba. How are you doing? Hi, hi, hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. You're the team for reaching out and for having me today. Yeah, and it's really exciting that you've got platforms like this, you know, where we could come out and actually talk about our journeys and talk about, you know, the challenges we face or some of, you know, the things that we actually need as youth, like you said, is youth in agriculture the actual answer to unemployment? And I think, I think yes, you know, and we'll discuss more in detail, you know, you know, as as the podcast goes along. Absolutely. So before we get into the crux of the show and discussing all these important topics around youth unemployment, may we just tell us about who you are in ISC farms, just so that we could understand your background in brief. Yeah. Okay, so I'm, I'd like to say small sale farmer really based in Pretoria. I'm a mixed farmer. I do both crop as well as livestock poultry farming really. In terms of livestock, I just have a couple of quotes that I'm using just to learn how to re and raise goats. In fact, I had one of my goats have twins a couple of months ago. That's a very exciting moment for me. But you know, my big business drivers is my poultry, you know, graders to be specific as well as crops, I do kale, spinach and mustard spinach for now. And yeah, so that's basically what I do. I'm 30 years old. It's my birthday today. And just to make small scale farmer based in Pretoria now. Wow. Well, firstly, happy birthday. How are you going to celebrate your birthday? Do you know how we farmers do it? I want to see my own daughter. So I really can't do much. But it is here on the farm. Yeah. Oh, well, happy birthday for myself and the private property team. So you studied marketing as well as corporate management, which is very different to agriculture. How did you find yourself in the agriculture? I guess, you know, I kind of I can't say I stumbled upon agriculture because, you know, first of all, I'm a second generation of farmer. My dad is a farmer. But not in a million years did I ever picture myself as a farmer growing up. It's crazy. It came to me almost like, you know, just like that, like a light bulb moment that just told me how I go into farming. And I love it. I've been loving it. Like I said, I was raised by a farmer 2020. I lost my job. I actually used to be a software sales executive in a very, very big company in Santa had, you know, the picket fence, nice house, nice car, nice everything and then COVID hit. And I took up voluntary retrenchment was either pick up or retrenchment. I decided, you know what, I'm actually done. And I'm going to pursue my farming dream, took my retrenchment package. And that was it. And that is three years ago. Three years ago. And I've been farming ever since. But of course, farming is not something that is new to me. I was raised by auctions and the selling of sale of pigs and cows. My dad is a farmer. He does cattle mostly livestock and cattle. He doesn't really do horticulture. Yeah. So that's how I got into farming. I got a tradition 2020 and I decided I'm not going to work for anyone anymore. And I'm literally going to farm. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, kudos to you for taking the leap of faith and obviously deciding that you're going to farm because you could have taken that retrenchment package and done something else, you know, started a property business or, you know, anything else that is in line with your passion. So now 2020 we are in 2022. You're running this farm, like you said, with with your father, you know, your second generation of farmer. Do you think it's easier running it with a family member as opposed to running it yourself? How's your experience been since you started managing the farm with with a partner? Fortunately, my dad is not, you know, he's not in the country. So we're running independently. So I've been doing it before, but with these guidance, constant nagging, all the time, you know, I'm practically running it. I'm doing it on my own. You know, I really wish my dad was here. I think things would be so much easier. Things would be so much better. All the mistakes I've made, I wouldn't have made them because, you know, I feel like farming is is something that we can talk about all day, but until you actually get into the field and experience is day by day by day. So when you actually learn that there's intricacies within farming that we, you know, we can never, ever, ever, ever know until you actually experience it. So I mean, it's challenging. I've made a lot of mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes. Because of course, I mean, my background is not really agriculture. I didn't study it, remember? And I've just been learning from my dad and what I've seen growing up. So I've made a lot of mistakes. I've learned a lot from a lot of my mistakes. I've made financial mistakes that have cost me lots and lots of money. And then of course, farming these external factors that really we can't control, that can't control. It has every single day that we're never ready for. I know last year, my crops got hit by frost, and I lost my entire field, all of them. And no one could ever get me ready for something like that. But you know, I'm stronger this year, why is that? I know exactly what I need. You know, I know how I prevent this, prevent that. So I guess it's been a very long journey, learning journey, the past few years have been an eye open to me, but I'm not giving up on so yet. Yeah, what type of crops were you farming? Especially those that were hit by crops frost? So I had, I had kale, right? I had kale, literally kale, if you hear, and it was for customer, I was, I had an order. And just before a week before I was going to harvest, and I got hit by frost. I had to sell it in formal market, but I did try and recover something, you know, you know, I guess, you know, farming is you have to kind of take it with its strides, like yeah, as you go, learn to recover and bounce back very quickly, or else you're going to fall flat on your face. So of course, as soon as I knew it wasn't, you know, that you know, my particular customer was not going to buy that I had to think on my feet in formal market, the guys that buy bundles, they were okay to take the kale over for me. Yeah, well, you know what, I think no farmer is a farmer until they're affected by frost, especially from a crop perspective. And no farmer is a farmer until they're affected by disease, where livestock is concerned. But you did say that you have a bit of life, livestock on the farm, pigory and cattle. Where are you selling the livestock farm? Is it direct off takes? Why are you selling through live auctions? So right now, I don't have, I'm not invigorating my dad, that's invigorating cows. So I do half or half and half. So it's off takes as well as I've got some informal customers. So I've got some really, really good informal customers that I've been working with since the beginning of my farming journey. And they come and pick up chickens almost on a weekly basis. So and and of course, because we don't want to, I guess the gripe is a small scale farmer is getting into the retail phase rather than formal off take agreements when it comes to things like, you know, your poultry, because of course, the regulations and all of that and all of that. I guess that's why most of us run to a formal market. But then I found a spa that and roots, you know, just a couple of to name a few of my customers that we already see that takes, but yeah, you know, it's been a really interesting journey. Yeah, you know, when I hear you talk, no matter, I'm just thinking like, Sure, you started this farming journey because you were retrenched. And now you are an employer today. You know, and obviously, you must be passionate about creating employment, because I can just see the passion exuding off of you, as you speak about farming over and above all the mistakes and the challenges that you've, you've you were faced with, you know, since you started your journey. So let's talk about that employer employee relationship. Now you're employer, you're creating employment. How many people are you managing on the farm? Are you employing? What does it look like from a gender perspective? Is this mostly male? Is it mostly female? Do you also have young, young employees on your farm? What's that relationship like now being the boss lady? So it's very interesting, right? Because I mean, this is a very, I don't know if I still like to call it a male dominating issue. So in the beginning, I was finding it very difficult to get your respect across from my employees, because I'm generally a very nice person. I'm always laughing, you know, and of course, when I'm a bit mad, I'm, you know, I'm serious, but I'll still say nicely. And then I had to learn, you know, how to balance, you know, to say, you listen, you have to be a strong boss and you have to be strict, or else things are not going to get done on the farm. But in terms of, I've got about, I mean, I've got four permanent employees. And depending, for example, I'm planting next week, I'm going to get another five teams. So I've got about five or six people that are on a temporary basis that I call every single time when there's a project or heavy lifting that needs to be done, particularly on the field. So when we're reading, you know, planting, and, and et cetera, or applying fertilizer and all of that stuff. So, but other than that, I just have four people here. And the same is pretty balanced. It's just, it's actually two males and two females. In the beginning, I had four guys. And then I found that out a little bit. And I started getting, you know, some ladies to come and help out. And with the five team, the ladies that come, they are like five females. So I am looking to actually empower some more and more people as I grow. And I'm also not using all the space that I'm on. So as I grow as myself, I'm looking to empower and employ more and more youth, especially female youth. Yeah. Yeah. Do you find that now that you've started your farm, especially with the workers that are working on your farm, are they saying that, you know, we should bring more young people do and also with family members, you know, since they found out that you're farming, what's the interest like, especially from the younger generation? Do are they surprised at this career switch, you know, that you've decided to take? And are they advocating more young people to get into the industry? Yeah. So the first thing is that everyone's always shocked. Like, how do you, how did you do you're a female? Why? You'd rather prefer playing as opposed to, you know, doing your nails. You know, I used to do my nails almost every week, you know, my hair, you know, all of that stuff. And I think they more, farming is almost becoming fashionable, believe it or not. And, you know, a lot of the youth, a lot of these young people are getting gravitated towards farming and agriculture, and they're very interested. I mean, right now, as you can hear, it's like a madhouse. I've got cousins here. They're running around up and down with my daughter up and down. And they always very interested. They always want to come to the farm. So I always have, especially my little cousins, they always want to come here. It's almost like I gave them this new world that they haven't been tapping into that makes excites them. My family was very, very happy to support me. Because I can say farming is not new to us. So, yeah. I think youth are actually taking on the fact that farming is not for old people. How would you encourage youth? I mean, it's one thing to attract young people to the agri sector, right? And like you said, you know, within your short span in this industry for now, you know, it's only been like from 2020 to 2022. You've experienced a lot of challenges and not everybody can really stand the fall, you know, especially when they're dealing with so many challenges at once, year in, year out, season after season. So it's one thing to attract youth, but how do you retain youth from your perspective? How do you think we can retain youth to continue to stay in the agri sector over and above all these challenges that we'll face and maybe bring your history or your background into how you did it? You said you were faced with so many challenges. So why are you here? Why are you still standing? What's keeping you motivated still? And you're still contributing to the sector over and above all these hardships that you've experienced in the past few years. So I think how we actually, we can attract them, but how do we make them stay? We make them stay by actually being on excess farmers. I think there's a lot of us that have always started this journey. People my age have made, I've met some amazing female male farmers that are my age, even younger, that are doing great, amazing things. But I think what we need to say, what communicating as farmers is that we need to stop communicating our happy stories all the time. And we need to stop being realistic and laying things out, you know, as they happen and how we got over them as opposed to, I'm a person, because I've been called a lot of people out, you know, on Twitter, right, to say, you know, I've seen people saying, I placed 5,000 chickens and I didn't experience a single mortality. Well, tell us how you did it. Number one, we'll just say, I followed all the steps. Tell us how you did it, tell us why, you know, and then so that the farmer that experienced 10 or 20 percent of the mortality knows how to recover from something like that. So I think it's more being, stop selling dreams and making farming look easy, but make it look realistic, but it is hard work. But if you put in the hard work and you have tenacity and you can literally just stand the rain, because in bad days don't last forever. You need to just be able to wear that. I need to know how to rule. You've got a mistake. I mean, I had coaxiliosis, hit my chickens and I lost 1,900 chickens. Now for a person that just started a business, you can imagine how that hit me financially. I could have just closed shop, but then with something like that, I understood, okay, this is the mistake that we did. The guys were going in with boots, the same boots that we're using in the goat's crowd, as well as in the chicken coops, and that you're not supposed to do that. And then therefore I started building my business up again, starting from small, as opposed to placing a thousand chickens at once. I would do 500 in batches of 500 so that I can give them more attention. Now you know, it's all about understanding that life is not easy. So farming, farming is not easy, but you need to just adapt as you go. You need to self-communicate realistically. The farming is possible, but if you just must not go into it thinking there's no challenges, because I feel like the moment a person experiences challenges, they close shop and then they've done, oh my god, I lost so much money in farming. But with any business you use money, with any business you experience challenges, but it's how you get up from there. You know, what do you learn? What are your takeaways and how are you going to make sure that those same mistakes don't keep happening? I'm not sure if I'm making sense of it. No, you're making... Bubble gum farmers on Twitter are saying, oh farming is great, guys. Yeah, yeah. No, I think you're speaking 100% truth, no shortcuts there, no lies there, and yes, you are making sense because I can definitely relate. I like the fact that be honest, be open, tell them of the hardships, and even I think we have the responsibility, right? Us as farmers that are sharing our stories and our journeys on social media to also share the bad parts and the difficult parts and the parts that make us want to quit, you know. So my last question to you is, and I think it's quite a big one, you know, do you think then, having now being going into the agriculture sector and farming now, do you think the agriculture industry is an industry that could possibly solve the unemployment crisis in South Africa? Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, agriculture doesn't get as much support as it should be getting, you know, from the power that makes you, you know, it's not like the chance of it. We need, because if you look at how many, I get so many agriculture, like every youth graduate that cannot be paid, I would love to take all of them, but how do I afford them as a small-scale farmer? So I think existing farmers needs to be empowered, to be able to empower more youth, if I'm making sense, to be able to take in already the people that are studying agriculture that are struggling to find jobs, and then there we can start looking at other faculties and the youth in general, because, you know, we just need the resources, we need the support, we just need, you know, because most of us are already there, but out of pocket with my own ability as Noma, it will take me at least 10 years to be able to set up an academy, you know, where I have got, maybe I can take on 10 students or 20 students a year. To be able to get there, it's going to take me some time, but if we actually got the right backing and the right support as small to medium scale farmers, I believe that we could actually do something or something significant to the unemployment of this country, not only just for youth in agriculture that have studied agriculture, there is so much that goes into agriculture, it's not even a job. As my business grows bigger, I will need someone to do my books, those are people in finance, to do, in terms of, instead of doing my books on, you know, a small little app and doing them myself, I'll need an accountant, and I'll need someone who's going to do all my brain branding and signage, and that's again marketing, there's so much, there's packaging, there is, there's just so much to this value chain where we could employ more people outside of just people that study agriculture or BSE in agriculture, but if you just employ the great bosses. Yeah, Nomathama, thank you so much for your insights today, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I'm quite happy to hear that, you know, you're very passionate again around employment, employing people, even if you know, you feel like you're not at the scale that you want to be at yet, because in the beginning of the conversation you said, I'm a small scale farmer, but please do not underestimate the value that you're having within the sector, the four or five people that you're creating employment for, that is big, because in essence, you know, they possibly, with employing four or five people, you're possibly just feeding close to 20 people, you know, and that's just impact alone, so thank you so much for coming onto the podcast, sharing your story, and just giving us some gents and really how we as farmers need to communicate truth around the sector, challenges that young people may find, but also the opportunities exist, because yet I do agree with you, not everybody can be a farmer, but there's so many other innovative areas in which young people can take advantage of within the agriculture sector to support farmers and also support the industry along the valley chain, so I wish you the best of luck with your planting season that's coming up soon, and with raising your livestock, your chickens, yeah let's let's not be a stranger to one another and I hope you're not going to be a stranger to the show, so when you are now a commercial farmer, please let us know your growth, share your journey and yeah, thank you for your time. Thank you so much Vali, thank you so much to you and your team again, thank you so much for your time, and we'll speak soon. Absolutely, that was Noma Tembasibanda Founder and CEO of NISC Farms, she's based in Pretoria and we were unpacking the topic around youth unemployment in in South Africa, is agriculture the sector that is going to solve youth unemployment in South Africa and she really had a good standpoint there, but I believe you need to go back and watch this video, hear what she said and her viewpoint around how we can create employment within the sector, solve the unemployment crisis and just grow the sector and empower youth who are already participating actively within the sector. If you enjoyed the show, please like, comment and most importantly subscribe to the private property farming podcast and also send through your suggestions of what you would like to see, what you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, because this podcast is for you, we're here to educate, inspire and inform you around the trail blazers that are making this industry a phenomenal sector to work in. Thank you so much for watching, take care.