 Good evening. Thank you so much for joining the Private Property Farming podcast. My name is Mbali Nwago, your host. Every Tuesdays and Thursdays of the Private Property Farming podcast, this is not the only podcast we have on private property. We do have other shows with Zama, SD, and we're centered around the property market, your first time of buying a home, and just the more technicalities about buying a home, property investments, property markets, et cetera. So if you have any interest in the property space, please visit our social media channels at Private Property on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram as well. And you'll find a lot of content, especially on the YouTube channel, where we host our weekly podcast as well as on the weekend. However, this is the farming show, and we're discussing everything to do about farming, food, growing your own food in your backyard, or farming on a commercial basis. This show will obviously answer any of your farming needs. This evening, our topic is affordable nutrition hacks. We speak to a farmer who's turned her passion for food as well as farming into an online eatery. She still has a 9 to 5 job just by the way. And so it's just great to always speak to a woman that is thriving, that is just challenging herself and doing so many things following her passion and her dreams. And we'll get to understand what Rihoma Deezer does, especially with her online eatery. So if you have any questions regarding our topic and to our guests this evening, please feel free to comment on our chat box. And we are happy to answer the question live on the podcast. But let's welcome our guests this evening. Thank you so much for joining us, Rihoma Deezer. How are you doing? Thank you, Mbali, for having me. I am more than how you're doing. I'm doing fantastic. You have an awesome profile. And I'm so curious to learn about this online eatery, how you turned your passion for food into a blog, put it out on social media, and started getting a following. But before we get into that, tell us about who you are, your journey into agriculture, because I know you're a farmer as well. OK, thank you so much. So my name is Rihoma Deezer Teke. And I am a farmer based in Rastenburg, Northwest. And I'm also a food content creator. So I basically started farming in my backyard after I got recrenched. My brother decided to buy me seedlings. That's how I basically started. I started with planting those seedlings. And then I realized that, actually, I love doing this. And then last year, he was like, oh, OK. Why not move to a bigger space? So we asked someone who is like a family member to lend us his yard. And he was happy and glad to do that. So we've been doing that ever since last year. And we started planting spinach, a bit of carrots, onions, and patinade. And we started supplying spinach to a local lodge nearby, which was great in the beginning. But going forward, it didn't really make financial sense. So we just started basically selling in our community, and as well as neighboring communities. And with regards to my food blog or a food page, basically, I started as just normal cooking. And then someone suggested, hey, why not post your recipes since you love doing this? And then I started a food blog, which later turned into an Instagram account, as well as other social media accounts. And I've been sharing recipes ever since. Right. So tell us about the recipes. Is it local food? Is it like Asian-inspired food recipes? Is it just anything that comes to the top of your mind in your head, and you just want to go crazy with regards to different ingredients? And are you using your ingredients or the crops that you're farming in your backyard into your food recipes? So it is basically just like everyday recipes. I just try to mix everything up. For example, one of the things that I've tried is that I've tried making pumpkin bread. I've tried making spinach bread. I've also tried making bawa and beetroot brownies. So, and all of that, I've used ingredients from my garden. So I basically just love mixing everything together and just like stretching my content as well as repurposing what I have created. The meals that I have created and turning it into something, I guess, magical, if I may say. So yeah. Right. I'm so excited, really, about what you do because you're showing us that there's so many things that we can do in the agricultural space, especially around food. And there's so many other dynamic and innovative ways we could teach people about food and educate them about food. But I know specifically with your food blog, you focus on recipes that don't break the bank or aren't necessarily expensive. And with food security being such a highly talked about topic, why did you feel it's necessary to have an online eatery or starter blog specifically focused on food that isn't very highly priced? Who's the audience that you're speaking to? And why did you decide to specifically look at that avenue of, I suppose, affordable food recipes, if I could say? So one of the things is that growing up, I never really loved cooking. I hated it with literally all my heart because I grew up in boarding school and they used to do everything for us. And then obviously I competed my machete and then I had to live alone and start cooking. And then I would visit my brother now and then while I was living alone. So he was just that one person who would literally just open the fridge and just take out whatever ingredients that is in the fridge and make something up. And I never could, I never, I was never able to do that. So I asked myself, how can this person possibly do that while I can? And then I started cooking more. I started reading more about food. I started searching recipes and then started developing my own recipes. So in that way, I just realized that you literally don't have to go out of your way to make something really simple and delicious. Delicious just look in your fridge or in your pantry and put two and two together and then make something. Right. So how has your blogs or how have your blogs taken shape? You said you started an Instagram account. What has been the traction from the audience? Have you maybe just done some research in terms of what the audience likes? Have you grained the following in terms of an audience based in South Africa or outside our borders? And where do you see yourself taking this blog to? So when I started, I initially started with a food blog. And I wasn't getting, I guess, like a lot of reception. And then I moved to Instagram. That's when I realized that actually people enjoy seeing recipes in picture form or videos rather than actually reading up the whole recipe. Because it also gives, if you take pictures of videos, it gives proper step by step where they can actually see, oh, this is how this person does it or this is how it turns out when they did it. So, and I realized that there is a way that I can, I guess, I checked my audience. And it was mostly a lot of young people who are food adventurers, if I may say. And people that like simple meals, people who don't like sitting on the stove for a really long time. So hopefully one day I will, I guess, have a book recipe, not sure that it's still in the pipeline, but I would really love to have my own food, I mean, my own recipe book since I already post the food. I mean, the recipes on Instagram, why not have it in a book? Absolutely, I look forward to that book. And I think maybe it's just a challenge that you could set for yourself, absolutely. But there's also, I read somewhere about your project. It's a school, your peer, let's form together project. What is that about, if you could just tell us in brief? So basically, that project is still in the penning phase, but what I want to do is basically just start guidance in school, so that some schools in, I guess, like in my community, they have feeling schemes. So basically we start guidance, we educate learners on eating healthy or eating healthy, eating healthy or healthy habits and starting a guidance, whether it's at school, whether it's at their homes, and if it's at their homes, they can sell that produce and make something for themselves. If it's at school, then the feeding scheme can use those produce to basically cook for the learners. Yeah, I think that's a great initiative because if you're all about nutrition and the feeding schemes are also all about nutrition, feeding the children at school, I think there's definitely a huge collaborative opportunity with feeding schemes and bringing new products into the dietary plan of feeding schemes. Actually, that's a fantastic idea, but looking onto your social media profiles, going specifically, going into Instagram, you post, I think, a variety or an assortment of foods and recipes, right? And again, going back to the not breaking the bank food or recipe or, yeah, I suppose, creating or planning a meal on a budget, are you very selective on the crops that you use or the ingredients that you use? For example, when I say selective, are you using crops that are relatively cheap so that again, when we do cook, we're not breaking the budget or you're just going all out and it's up to the person to pretty much source where they get the ingredients, et cetera, because again, we want to cook food, we want to taste all sorts of ingredients in our food every single day, but how do we maintain that without, again, breaking the budget? So if you can look at all my recipes, you basically see that this is basic food. All of the ingredients that I used are very basic. As you mentioned that I have made spinach bread. Spinach is accessible everywhere. I've made pumpkin bread. Pumpkin is also accessible everywhere. So you don't need to break your budget or go out of your way to create my recipes. So you literally just put two and two together. Whatever you have in your fridge, you can basically use that. One of the things that, the meals that I have created, as I mentioned earlier on that I love stretching my content is so the previous night I had made worse and then in the morning I decided, okay, why not make pizza out of this sauce? And then I just basically made, yeah, so I just basically made pizza dough using just flour and yeast. And then after that I just broke eggs in that pizza dough and then I put the leftover that I used the previous night so that when you literally do not break your bank, you literally just source from whatever that you have. Wow, this is so great. I mean, going to your farming journey which I'm quite curious about and I know that you said, you're farming in your backyard and you found additional piece of land, you started a spinach and other crops as well. Are you still continuing that? Are you creating content around your farm? Maybe to start a backyard farm? And another question that I wanna ask is, how has it been? How's the journey been? Like you said, you started supplying to a local lodge but you found that it wasn't making business sense and you're selling to the community. Maybe firstly, let's answer the question around the community because a lot of people have a problem with finding markets. They'd say, I'm a farmer, I just started two months ago, I've got crops ready for harvest, but I can't find a market. And people forget that their neighbor next door could be their customer or is their customer because everybody eats food. So how has your journey been in finding markets? So maybe take us through securing that local lodge to supply produce. And what are the things that made you decide that this doesn't make business sense that has then directed you to going to sell directly to the communities? So I guess our first biggest mistake was also planting without a market. That's when we decided actually, why not approach local lodge that we can supply spinach with? At first it was exciting. You know, when you supply a big client, you feel like, oh my God, not necessarily that you made it, but this is that thing that actually I'm working. And then later on we realized, no, this is not making financial sense because we supply spinach at, as spinach is at this price, but we supply at this price, first we also deliver for free basically. And then we decided, no, why not just supply our local communities? And I think that we do is that they don't always have money. So we don't mind if they pay, if they can buy from us without paying immediately, they can pay later because we basically just know each other. So we just have like a certain trust, yeah. And then we realized that there is no use in us not I guess supplying them when they don't have money because what are we gonna do with the rest of the produce? So also getting in the challenge part when we started last year, oh, we experienced a lot, a lot of challenges, literally one would have given up. So our pump at some point, our pump was not working, we had to get that fixed. And in the meantime, we had to buy water that is an expense on its own. We fixed the pump and then later on it completely stopped working. So we had to buy new one. And before buying a new one, we also still had to buy water. And at some point in December, there was a point where it was raining like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And I was finished round. So you basically lost everything and then we had to regroup and restart. So last year, literally we didn't make any money. It was just like a loss throughout. So that's what people also need to understand that in family or in any other business, you're not always gonna make profit. Things aren't always gonna go the way that you can them to go or the way that you want them to go. So literally it's just, I guess a risk if I may put it that way that you shouldn't be willing to take. And you should also be willing to make sacrifices along the way. Yeah. And with the communities, I like the fact that, you know, you've also I suppose stretched the way you do business and are slightly fix flexible in how your clients pay you for the produce. So are the other people from the local communities buying directly from your land? And is that what then cause a decision to say? If people are coming directly to my farm, there's no need for me to supply the local BNB simply because I have a logistics cost to it. So literally what we do, we don't even need, I guess like a car to sell in our community. We literally just take it well, but we go house to house. We say, hey, we sell spinach. So if you have money, you can buy it now. If you don't, then you can pay later. So I guess that is a cost effective way. One of the cost effective ways that we are doing business. Yeah, yeah. And how have young people viewed you in your community? I mean, you're a young woman in the agri industry, growing your own food in your own backyard, and creating such a fantastic blog around recipes that everybody can try at home. You know, how have young people looked at you and maybe just your friends rather, your inner circle, they said, you know, are you crazy farming? That's something that we just, I suppose not really thinking about, you know. So how have young people, your friends, those in your inner circles viewed this passion that you've decided to pursue? So most or rather all of my friends and really farmers, I'm literally the only farmer. And in my community, it's mostly men, like young men that are actually inspired with regards to women, because they feel like it's a man's job to work the land, to plan, to do everything that has to do with farming. It's literally like, oh my God, I am not gonna do that, I can't do that. So with a lot of men, they always encourage me to never give up, to keep pushing. Even when I sit with a wild bird, no one just looks at me weird like, hey, what are you doing, you know? So, but with young people in my community, no one has really approached me to say that, hey, we'd like to help, we'd like to learn, not even help, but just to want to learn so that they can, I guess, like start their own gardens. And I guess they're comfortable with buying, I don't really know, but yeah. Yeah, my last question for you this evening, Rekha, is I wanna know, you've mentioned all these setbacks, you know, pumps, water, rain, et cetera. What kept you going? I mean, you could have easily given up. What kept you going? I think it's made me the reason why we started or rather why I started, you know? I literally started from like a small garden to still a backyard that is much more bigger. So if I have come this far, why should I stop now? There's really no reason to stop. And as I mentioned, these are literally just small setbacks because now we're back on our feet, we now have planted cabbage, spinach and beetroot. So imagine if we had stopped last year and we don't have competition, no one is doing this in my community. So there's literally no reason for me to stop. Yeah, yeah. Well, keep going. If you're just watching us, we're speaking to Rekha Muditze and she is a young farmer and a food content creator. So far, our chat this evening has been all about her story, her background, her farming journey, but most importantly, her food blog that she started and created a wonderful Instagram account that is over a thousand followers. I think slowly approaching 2,000 followers now and she's creating recipes from using various ingredients, ingredients that she's farmed in a backyard garden, to ingredients that she's just sourcing from wherever and she's just channeling her passion for food and farming into this blog, into the recipes that you can try at home. Please follow her social media page. We will have her link at the end of the show and support her and maybe try out some of those recipes at home since we are on level three lockdown. But yeah, I think Rekha, I just firstly want to thank you for just availing your time this evening. What last words can you leave us with, especially as a woman in the agri and food space? What message do you have for women as we close off the show? Yeah, whether it's young woman, whether it's slightly an older generation, what message would you give to women in the agri and food space? Thank you very much, Mali, for having me and with regards to the messages that I have, women or like young women, since also it's woman month, miss month rather. So I just want to encourage everyone that every woman or to basically just start whatever that you want to do, whether it's an agri, whatever business, just start and no matter the setbacks, literally you are all you have and there is nothing stopping you. Just keep going. If you need help, there's social media, you can ask help from people that are already doing whatever that you want to do or if you want to get into that field, there's still also social media and people that are already doing it. So why not stretch your hand and ask for help? Wow, thank you so much. That's it from us this evening. As you heard it from Rekha Medita Deghe, she said her message to the woman out there is just start. Whether you want to start a farm, become a food content creator, turn your passion into something you might educate a lot of people who have an interest in that specific niche or topic, whatever it is that you're doing but the most important thing is just start. Trial and error, you'll learn along the way. However, starting will obviously lead to something just as Rekha has done. But that's it from us tonight. I'm signing off and I will catch you next week, Tuesday. It's gonna definitely be a long weekend for everybody because on Monday it is a woman's month. So happy woman's month to all the women out there. And I really hope you spend time with family and loved ones, checking up on those that you haven't spoken to in some time, but don't forget to follow us on all our social media channels on private property and please support our podcast because we have a wealth of information, a wealth of valuable information for that matter. And yeah, that's it for me and I'll catch you next week, next week, Tuesday. Thank you, good night.