 Tell us something about farming that you think people don't know. Farmers online make it look glamorous. We are guilty for that. Farming is hard. Farming is demanding. Farming will take away all your social life and it's either you're going in deep and doing it or you don't do it at all because you lose money. It's the one game where it's either you win or you lose. It's a gamble, you know, but also gambling is smart. You gamble, you gamble smart, you win. Is it lucrative for you? Yes. Farming is very lucrative for me. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be doing it. Well, class 1, farm. It's not done yet. Now, now you can lift it. Well done. Yay! My name is Nomali Somsasiewa. I am a farmer and I am a tech entrepreneur. We have built a business called Fresh in a Box which is essentially a data company very much tech-oriented and we've built a lot of our solutions within the agricultural space. I became a farmer by mistake but I found my passion. Why I do farming is because it follows simple logic. I plant something, I tender it, I care for it and it grows and gives me money. I love the soft life but there's also like a feeling effect of working with nature. It always gives you if you take care of it. I've learned that over time. It's not an easy game but it's fulfilling. I think I've made it to life. Spending the day with Noma. Because everybody in Zimbabwe is talking about you. Really now. Jeez! My name is Maya. Hi Maya. An annoying village boy from Ghana who is on a journey to change the negative narrative of Africa. But I really want to ask you a question. Yeah. No man. Do you think Zimbabwe's economy depends on farming? Depends no. Realize? Yes. This is the only country that I've been to that I've seen so many young farmers. Yeah. I feel like everyone is a farmer in this country. Everyone actually is I think. Really? Yeah but it's a recent revolution. So take us back to the time when we had the land reform and we got into a space of not being the bread basket anymore to being the basket case some would say. And we started to be on a journey to see who should be doing the food production. Because I think we spent a lot of time not knowing who used to produce the food right. And there's many of us African people who then said okay but we've been farming. We were the ones farming the land. Why don't we continue that process? And so it's been a revolution. But to see young people in agriculture, I think we've seen a lot of that happening pre-COVID, the first year pre-COVID. Okay. All the way into during COVID time. The only thing that you could do, the only thing that you could do and not be locked down was be in the field, right? So farming became the new thing, became the new profession. It was the only thing that was in the essential services because people have to eat. Right now I am on a 10 hectare farm and I'm tilling 6.5. She's a big girl. Yeah, there are bigger people out there. Here I am. How long have you been in farming? For the last four years now. So I didn't start farming because I loved farming. I'm actually a tech entrepreneurial who uses solutions in the agricultural space. So my main journey into farming was from Freshener box or e-commerce site. Right? And that e-commerce site, we work with smallholder farmers, backyard farmers, to bring together vegetables, fresh fruit and veg and we deliver to people's homes. And during that building, we ended up getting into a position where the farmers that were around used to follow trends, right? So like, Zimbabwe is a weird place. So there was a tweet that came out and said this guy had like this beautiful Toyota with D4D with plastics and everything. And he posted on and says, I got this brand new car because I sold cabbages. Guess what? The following season, everybody had cabbages. I'm a mathematics graduate from the University of Zimbabwe. I don't farm, right? I was like, I probably could hack a math formula, coordinate people to grow and then it works out. The problem with being book smart is that it never actually translates to the practical smart unless you know how to do it. Then the universe was like, hey, I'm going to send you somebody who's got a place. So then this place came about to be and then I started farming. So I needed to learn how to farm for me to be able to actually work very well with farmers. Mama, were you born and raised in Haraj? No, actually, I'm a bluer girl. Oh, okay. Yes, it's the city of kings. It's in the south of Zimbabwe and that's where I grew up. That's where I was born from. I only came here for uni and they use it. You ever left the country? To travel, yes. No, I mean to live in the country. No, no, no, that's my husband. Thank you for coming. Welcome to Zimbabwe. Thank you. How is life in Zimbabwe? Are you doing this with your husband or are you doing it alone? I'm doing this with my husband, but in the farm, well, that's all me. So what is your husband doing to help you then? Okay, so my husband, I'll say he can sell ice to an Eskimo pretty much, but here's the brains behind the freshener box, the technology that we develop. Here's the guy that knows how to package it and sell it more understandably to people. He's very great with marketing and branding, you know, and he's pretty much the superstar, but he's, you know, he shares his limelight with me. So that's, that's more what he does. So I grow the veg, he sells the veg. The first ever business that we've got into was Zoodies, Zimbabwe and Hoodies. And we're pretty much selling them online and we're trying to like own some of our, some of our realities in the apparel that we wear. So we had one Zimbabwe and Hoodie. And at the time we were very close to elections. So we had the MDC ones, we had the Zano PF ones. We're just trying to, you know, make everyone wear whatever it is that you support. But then always remember in your mind that at the end of it, it's about being Zimbabwean. However, different opinions are beyond what government comes into place. We still have to put Zimbabwe first. And then that was the whole idea and that was great. But then it also lasted as long as the election. As soon as it was done, we're like, okay, what to do next? Then came Fresh in a Box. And Fresh in a Box has morphed into like a lot of things. Just morphed into like a lot of things. The reason why I ask you this is because of capital to start up a farm. You know, a lot of young entrepreneurs out there keeps on complaining that I don't want to be a farmer because it's a capital intensive. But you have done it. So I want to know how did it all start, where the funds came from? With capital intensiveness of a farm, that's a reality of most, of every farmer in the world, right? The Americas and the Europe have got their banks, the federal banks subsidizing farmers, you know, because they have to produce food. And unfortunately, that method hasn't worked out well in Africa. If you look at how we've been doing this, right? We haven't had access to loans because it's been difficult to try and find a loan when you don't own land. So for instance, I'm leasing this land. It's not mine, right? So I can't walk up to the bank and say, hey, listen, I have been leasing this land for three and a half years now, two, four years. Please, may I please have some money and give me for 10 years, even if my lease does give me that loan, right? Because any farmer needs at least about 10 years to like very well establish themselves. So it is capital intensive. We've built everything on this farm, based on the profits of Freshener box. So we've built very little. When we got here, we opened up that space first. And then we opened up the greenhouse sections. You'll see the greenhouses are not perfect. They're not plastic. It's just structure. So I'm literally farming on open land and it's not greenhouse, right? I would ideally love to be on greenhouse. And just my still greenhouse structure requires about 22,000 to 28,000 US dollars to put up. My output would definitely shoot up. But even if I told that to a banker, they'll be like, that's a nice story to hear. But knowing that the economy of this country rely on farming, I guess there should be grants from the government to support young farmers or even farmers in general. So I think, okay, the government does have grants, right? Are they giving you some of the grants? No, no, no. I was about to explain because I don't want you to never not know the truth. The government does have a, it's not necessarily a grant, but it is a loan system. But the way it's always been structured is to look at the big commercial farmers. So remember Zimbabwe was made up of white commercial farmers. There are not many of them. I think there are about 500 of them. They could feed the whole of Zimbabwe and stuff like that in export. But now that there's many of us farmers, like I work with 2,800 plus farmers, right? And all of those farmers don't have big trucks of land like 200 hectares. One has one hectare. Another one has got like 200 square meters and stuff like that. So it's not huge trucks of land in one place. It's huge land in different places. And the government only structures those kind of loans. So it's called command agriculture. You will meet maybe some of the farmers that we, that I'm associated with from my farmers union who are in that scheme. And I'll tell you that it works for them because they have huge trucks of land that they are working on, right? So those kind of grants work for them. They haven't managed to figure out how to assist a smallholder farmer. That is not necessarily a subsistence farmer. The economy of the smallholder farmer has not been addressed. And I think that that's a role that we want to see government still getting to. That's a role that we want to see private sector still support because 60% of the land in Zimbabwe is with smallholder farmers, like it or not, right? They are the stewards of the land, right? I'm the steward of the land here. But if I have no access to capital, there's no one who's designing a financial instrument for me to be able to farm. I will use my every, that's why I cry when I see somebody stepping on my 50 cent cabbage because there's a profit there that I want to plant back into the ground, right? I'm going to build 10 times slower than my counterpart in South Africa because their banking institution has figured out how to handle their different types of farmers, right? I'm building slower than my counterpart in Kenya because it is the hub of capital right now in Africa. You know what I mean? The agri-space, they have all of the money, right? So that's the reality that we have. Do I think that government has got a lot of scope to work on? Absolutely. Have they done enough for the farmers? No. So here we'll learn clearing. We're about to prep. So we do a lot of intensive farming here because every plant that you see, for instance, we're growing a cauliflower. So this one's an infancy stage and it's going to grow into something like this, right? But it takes 90 days. So I can't afford to have any land follow because it means I only earn every 90 days and I've been developing a system for me to plant 365 days and harvest 365 days so that I can at least earn every day for me to be able to sustain my workload and stuff. So you'll see that most people tend to farm something and then let the land rest and leave it follow with the cover crop. We have to remove it. We'll clean up this area. By the time we go into the evening, it's going to be something else on the ground. So we start. But the crops are not ready? No, these ones are done. It's done. And you've taken it off for it? This is the fruit. All of this is done. Like, well, we're done. This is over. Well, if you want to eat the green veg, great. But that's done. It's over. How I wish this is Ghana because this should be cassava. Okay. We hate the greens, man. We want the roots. You want the roots. But yeah, so that's going to be done. Why do I feel like your greenhouse is way different? They used to be different. No, I mean, what I'm seeing right now, it doesn't look like a greenhouse that I know. What happened to the roof? Okay, so this is the myth of not accessing capital, right? That's the result of that. So you have greenhouse structures that used to be here, but you have to change the plastic for your green housing every five to 10 years. So when I got here, it was already like this. And I was like, no, we're going to put up greenhouse structures and stuff. We're going to know. And then you go and find out how much that costs. Because shitting this greenhouse would cost about $15,000. Dollars? Dollars. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. What has been the major challenge since you started this farm? My biggest challenge was learning how to coordinate what I want out of my farm and having the people that I work with understand how intensive and fast moving we need to be. That's the biggest. Aside of capital, aside of pests and diseases, because that's very common in agriculture. We can't expect it to be different. Those are the things. Just the coordination of how fast moving we want to be versus them acting fast. I think that was the biggest challenge since I started. But we're on it now. We get it. Finance is not a major challenge. I mean, it is a challenge. I just never want to always major on it because then I never get to do anything. It's now a matter of fact that smallholder farmers don't access financing a lot in Zimbabwe especially. We're already country risk to be given money. Now that I know that, what am I going to do about it? I have to find another way. So that is not even in my challenges to tackle today. I'm not doing that. If I do get the financing, great. If there's an ad about, oh, smallholder farmers, grants, I apply. If I get it, awesome. If I don't, still good. We still have to do what we have to do to produce, to sell, and put the profits back in. What keeps you moving? The big idea that I don't need to own greater parts of the land. I need to know how to use technology to help me be one of the biggest producers in the country. And like I said, I'm already working with 2800 smallholder farmers. We make a total of about, what, 300 hectares of land in total? That's huge amounts of land that we're intensively growing on. We now need to figure out how to sustainably grow, use more biodiversity methods for us to continue having food. And we're sharing to that wealth. So unfortunately, it's not 300 hectares of land and all of it goes to me. It's 300 hectares of land shared amongst a 2000 of us. And we see how we keep growing from that. The fresh farm looks this small, but the real fresh farm is big dotted places all over Harare for now that produce for fresh in a box and deliver to people's homes every day. It's a good feeling. Like seeing fruit like this is a good feeling. Seeing it go to waste like this is a lot of money. A lot of money. That breaks my heart. That breaks my heart because this is like what? 90 cents a kilo. This is relatively almost a kilo. It's a lot of money I could put back in, but it's the reality of farming. There is post harvest loss. Have we been in conversations about how we stop post harvest loss? Absolutely. But we're still getting there. Do I think I could value add a cauliflower maybe, but it's like freezing it, right? Yeah. And blast freezing in a place where you got here and there was no electricity. How do you irrigate the crops? There's drip irrigation, and I use overhead irrigation on the bigger part of the lands where we were. Thank God you don't have a payment. That's why thank you for helping who consider charity because if I have to pay you, you need a payment. Don't worry. This says that you have charity on my channel. So it's all right. I'll do it for charity. When you hear the name Africa, what comes to your mind? Great scope and defeat. I don't know why it's such an oxymoron. Whoa. You did ask what came to mind. It's an oxymoron in the sense that you know how we always talk about Africa's got like a lot of potential. We have the most people. We could probably industrialize and be the richest continent. We are the richest continent on minerals in terms of just our people. We are so adaptable. We're malleable. We do everything. The greatest countries in the world were literally built on the backs of black people. And yet there comes my oxymoron. We are still as many if not more than the people that built the Americas that built the Europe. And yet we're failing to just build our own environment. Why is that so? I don't know. Like it feels like we need to be subjugated for us to be in a better position. If you look at all of our African countries during colonialism, we were developing at a faster and better pace than when we got our independence. Something turned. Like why didn't we continue doing what we were doing? I think the education system was meant to teach us how to think. Like I never want to make excuses for why we as Africans are not doing the needful. I want to always hold myself more accountable than what my circumstances have brought me to. You know what I mean? So yes, there's a lot of issues. Like I told you, like if I ever used capital as my biggest challenge, I'll never do anything because I'm like, I can't start because I don't have capital. And yet there's a lot of things that I could have done. I could be doing enough for me to get started. It's going to take me longer. But who's in a rush in Africa anyway? I heard in Zimbabwe when you grew corn, that's solid to the government. Okay, if you grow maize, yeah, but then not this kind of small scale maize, right? So this is sweet corn. It's a different type of corn. This one's more horticultural focused type of corn. Eat it with your meals, use it for brides and stuff. But if you're growing like hectic maize and you're on command agriculture or you're on that subsistence farming and you have extra, you have to take it to the grain marketing board because the design of how we all feed each other is based on taking grain to the central grain marketing board for us to distribute food to each other. Remember what I said about if there was anything I could change about Zimbabweans? I'd change our mindset. No matter how hard the government will try now, there's always somebody who's going to find a loophole, exploit it, and then make those tries or gains fruitless. And then somebody else is going to prosper big. And that's not the person's problem because we've had to deal with very badly dealt hands for so long that all everyone is thinking about is if it's not going to be me and my people, then... Life in Zimbabwe is a paradox, right? So I wouldn't be anywhere else in the world. I think it's a beautiful place. But at the same time, we've got all struggles. You know, like most African countries, you'll notice that there's the gap between the haves and the have-nots is huge, right? And we're in a bit of a crux at the moment. We're coming into an election year. The polarization in our nation is huge. You're living abroad? Yeah, I've lived a broad more of my life than I've lived here. So it's good to be home, right? It's good to be in a place where I don't ever feel like I have to check my visa. I don't feel like there's any limitations in what I can do here, you know? Bro, a lot of us are looking forward to, I mean, living in the UK, US, you had all of that and decided to come back in here. Is everything okay with you though? A lot of people say that to me, right? And I think I always try to explain to people that your home is best, right? I don't particularly like the weather in London, you know what I mean? It's very, very cold. I found myself very out of place in New York because there's a certain speed and capitalism that just sort of dehumanizes me as an African. Wow. You move back to Zimbabwe? Would you say it's worth it? Yes, absolutely. I think for me it's been really worth it, but I also must be very honest about my privilege, right? So I can do things because I went away and with the exposure and the experience and sometimes even the wealth accumulated overseas, you can do better when you come home. See, I don't think a person who had stayed home could do what we're doing now, right? Exactly. So will you encourage the diasporans to come back home and help rebuild Africa? The diaspora has a really huge role. If you look at countries like Israel, for example, which are built off the backs of a very strong diaspora who have made it a haven for their children to love going to Tel Aviv on the holidays and so forth. I mean, this is what we must be doing as well as Africans that when we come home, we should be enjoying the best, the fruits of the land. And I'm hoping a lot of diasporans will be there right now, cold and miserable and missing home and missing the food and missing the culture. And it's like there's an opportunity to have the best of both worlds and I really encourage people to rebuild their nations, especially as Zimbabwe. If you had a chance to change one thing, is Zimbabwe or will it be? I'll change the mentality of the leadership, right? And I think there is a mentality that maybe is an African trait that does not gel well with capitalism. You know, the cronyism, the nepotism, you know, tribalism, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the kind of things that are really bringing us down as a nation, right? And, you know, I would love a country that worships and celebrates a meritocracy. Rather than, oh, we're from the same tribe, we speak the same language, we speak the same, you know, we're from the same totem. I would love a place where it says, this guy's really good at what he does, let him do it. And then this guy's really smart with numbers, let him do that, right? Because right now we're being led by inept individuals who are there purely because of patronage and purely because they fought a war that nobody of our generation remembers. We appreciate, and I think the new war is the war with ourselves. The new war is the war of how do we get out of poverty? How do we get into the 21st century? How do we get across the internet? How do we get, you know, better technology and greener technology to save our planet? These are the new wars that we must be fighting. We cannot be fighting colonial wars in 2022. So we've been building an app that is called Let's Farm Africa, right? It's supposed to be a crowdfunding platform for smallholder farmers to be able to say, okay, this is what I'm doing. I want to do a greenhouse like this. I need $5,000 to get it up and running. I want to produce sweet peppers and tomatoes. In two seasons, I should be able to pay you back your money. Please, guys, crowdfund for me. So, you know, putting your money, you don't have to put a lot of money from as little as $5 to maximum $500 and build that one farmer app. We believe that by building those little cells, we're going to be able to create an economy where people can still land without having to suffer the legalities of having collateral and so forth. You know, I read about you, yeah? Where? No, you're all over the internet. That's why I'm saying I'm a celebrity. You know, meeting you, I feel like I made it to life. That's nice. I feel like I made it in life. Oh, come on. You're a political activist. Now we look towards our aging parents for help. When all of their pensions, savings, and livelihoods has been stolen from them at least four times in one lifetime. And I started to realize that at the age of 27, I haven't even achieved anything close to what they had when they were 27. And now all I'm doing is to hope that a passport that I applied for ages ago could come out so that I can go and try and live my dream elsewhere as a servant in foreign lands. Yeah, I'm a conscious citizen. I don't like being called a political activist. I just have a really strong opinion when it comes to politics because I understand how it affects daily life. That's all. So conscious citizen more than political activist. And I'll take it. Why you started that, though? When I was in uni, yeah. But I used to do student politics. University gives you a platform to experience the country or the world in a very contained form. And that kind of politics was heavily, heavily influenced by our national politics. So we could never like progressively have conversations on how we build a community or we build a nation within the university, bring up bright ideas without being clogged by the national politics. And that's why I got in there to try and say, let's bring our smartness from university and build solutions for what we can then offer the nation because the national politics wasn't offering anything except for polarization. It was polarizing us. You stopped or you're still doing it? You know, I still have a conscious opinion. I've stopped making videos like no BS I used to do on my YouTube channel because there's only so much you can keep reiterating. I think the things that I spoke about five years ago are still the same things. And it's absolutely disheartening for me to realize that I'm still talking about the same things and nothing is changing. And if I can't change it by having a conversation online, I need to do something else. Farming is my new activism. Food is political, you know. What can I do to show results that if I change what I'm doing right now, there's a way that I will influence the politics. It may not be a kaboom, big splash show of changing the politics, but I can definitely tell you that ever since we started the farming conversation in Zimbabwe, it's becoming the loudest and the loudest and the loudest conversation about Zimbabwe. That's why you can come in and say, would you say farming is Zimbabwe's backbone? And I say, no, but then it relies on it because we've started that conversation and we've kept on amplifying it. Everyone wants to be a farmer and rightfully so because there's more tangible results. You can see the results. It's no longer a policy. You know the reason why we don't get results in terms of talking about politics? Yeah. Because I feel like the older generation are not ready to work with a younger generation. And it's everywhere in Africa. The collaboration is not there. You don't think so? Because I feel like if they can tap into what we have and then work on it, just join forces together to help build the continent together. But I think they are not ready for this conversation, by the way. I think they want to have the conversation. We have an arrogance as young people because of the internet, like the globalization concept has gotten to us. We have an arrogance to how we approach them. And I think the African society in how elderly people are treated they still want to hold on to that. And yet the way we want to bring our ideas and how we operate has a lot of arrogance to it. That's why we don't have that collaboration. And unfortunately, for us to progress, we can't not be arrogant about the situation. Our ideas are pretty much very arrogant. And they have to be like that for them to be forceful, for them to move, for them to move the needle when it comes to certain things. And I think that's where our breaking apart is. We'll find each other. We'll find each other. I want to know, is it a lucrative business? Farming is a lucrative business if you can explore two or three parts up the value chain. We produce, we process and repackage, and then we deliver. It is worth it when you look at it that way. If you do farming alone, for it to be a lucrative business, you need it to be at massive scale. And you need government subsidy. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Is it lucrative for you? Yes, farming is very lucrative for me. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be doing it. Fresh in a box in the next 10 years, I definitely see it as a juggernaut within Southern Africa. In terms of how we use technology to develop spaces of agriculture and how we apply generally to everything that we do and connect it together. Being a female entrepreneur in Zimbabwe is not an easy sport because I'm a mom too. So moms have got expectations to building homes. You don't bring the challenge the way I do right now and still manage to keep the home together. So you have to bring your 210% to make it all fit in. I have to trade off something. Sometimes my children don't get to see me as much because I have to do the needful to bring an entrepreneur. I have to give in my 28 hours and 24 hours because that's what's going to put food at the table and that's what's going to make me a cut above the rest. But I have an advantage of having married the right person. My partner is the best compliment to what we do. Our life is pretty much our business and our business is our life. So we know how to take it all in and never try and separate things so that we experience it all. We have it all in one basket and get the joys and the sadness of it all. And that's the experience of a female entrepreneur in Zimbabwe.