- In 2006, Diana Sitima bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Malawi’s commercial capital and set about establishing an agroecological farm.
- She grows a variety of fruits and vegetables and keeps a range of livestock on her 3.5 hectares (nearly 9 acres), each element chosen as part of a system complementing the rest.
- Twenty years on, the sought-after produce from her farm in Chiradzulu district illustrates both the success that these agricultural techniques can bring and some of challenges that make her example hard for others to follow.
- As she mentors other farmers in her district, she notes the absence of financial and technical support needed to secure land and build up the knowledge and experience needed to prosper.
CHIRADZULU, Malawi — Diana Sitima’s farm on the outskirts of Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, is both example and an exception. Where neighboring farmers have planted mostly maize for food and for sale in nearby markets, people drive out to buy sweet potato, pigeon peas and vegetables, bananas and avocado, and eggs produced on Sitima’s 3.5-hectare (8.6-acre) property.
Sitima started farming in 1993. Unlike her neighbors, farming was a side hustle to begin with: she worked as an office assistant in Blantyre and her husband had a good job with a bank. Over the next seven years, she and her husband took out a series of micro-loans, renting small parcels of land and hiring people from the village to grow tomatoes for sale in the city.
Sitima’s efforts went well, and because her family did not have to rely on their harvest for food or an income at that time, she was able to save the money she earned to take a next step. She quit her office job and acquired a farm of her own in Chiradzulu district, 15 kilometers (9 miles) east of the city.
“That’s how I made money to be able to buy this land when it was put up for sale in 2006,” she says.
While she was still a part-time farmer, Sitima attended several workshops, where she picked up ideas about agroecological farming — an approach combining crops, agroforestry, fish ponds, poultry and livestock, in a self-reinforcing system that protects soil health and reduces the need for synthetic fertilizer or pesticides.
When she bought a piece of land of her own, she consulted government extension workers in the district to help her set it up.
A farm where everything’s connected
Growing in front of the houses on her Chiradzulu compound are papaya, avocado and mango trees, a flourishing garden of herbs and other plants such as okra, amaranth, lemongrass, and two spekboom plants.
“These are the flowers of our home,” says Sitima, plucking a succulent spekboom leaf and chewing it as she guides Mongabay around the farm. “They are a source of medicine and food for us and our livestock.”
At the back of the house is a semicircular fence of adjoining coops for a dairy cow, pigs, goats, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, and indigenous chickens. At the center of this fence is a pigeon loft made of bamboo and a brick enclosure housing a large black bladder — a biodigester into which the Sitimas put the manure from the farm to generate biogas for cooking and to power an incubator for eggs.
Stretching down from the edge of the livestock pens is a field intercropped with vegetables, sugarcane, maize, pigeon peas, sweet potatoes, avocado, plantain, and bananas. Near the bottom, there are three ponds, two for fish and a smaller one for azolla, an aquatic fern that the Sitimas use to supplement their livestock’s feed.
“We’re almost 100% organic. The animals and the crops support each other in various ways,” Sitima says, throwing maize kernels at the chickens and pigeons in the yard, at the conclusion of the tour of the farm.
From the experience she had, Sitima says, she knew farming could be big business for her; but she didn’t have all the knowledge to make her farm profitable, she says. She has therefore relied on advice from extension workers from the government.
“I have been running the farm for 20 years now and I still seek their advice,” she says.
“They told us to start with vegetables because they grow quickly and are always in demand. The good thing is that this place is moist throughout the year, so there were no irrigation costs and it also allowed us to grow all year round.”
Vegetable farming proved to be a vital source of income for Sitima and her husband. They combined the profits with some savings and loans to buy the Chiradzulu farm. And Sitima’s move into agriculture proved timely: her husband was retrenched from the bank he worked at just three years after the couple bought their plot.
The farm has been their office since. She says they turn over the equivalent of $1,200 in sales a week and employ six permanent workers, with dozens more hired on a casual basis as needed.
Inspiring other women farmers
On the day of Mongabay’s visit in March, two women from the neighboring village are also at the farm. One of them, Anna Chisale, says Sitima has been an inspiration to the women because of her persistence.
“We have been learning from her and we have grown in belief that we too can achieve as women farmers,” she says.
The two visitors are members of the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA), a grassroots movement of small-scale women farmers in 11 countries in Southern Africa. Sitima chairs a group of 60 members of the assembly’s Malawi chapter in the district.
Chisale says the RWA is helping her find her voice on the importance of women owning land for food production. She and the other members are also finding out about loan schemes for women farmers and learning farming practices that protect soil health, such as agroforestry.
In 2019, Chisale and her colleague started growing gliricidia trees on their farms. These nitrogen-fixing trees help improve the fertility of the soil in their fields and reduce their reliance on inorganic fertilizer. They also say they’ve seen an improvement in their maize harvests. Chisale says over the past two growing seasons, she has harvested almost 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds) of maize from her field — double what she used to produce previously — ensuring that she and her three children have enough food to eat for the whole year.
“Of course, when we tour this farm, we are amazed at its productivity. We admit that it will take us years to get to this level,” Chisale says.
Why land ownership matters
Sitima’s farm illustrates the possibilities — and the technical and financial pillars — of profitable commercial gardening near a ready market like Blantyre. She took advantage of the opportunity that nonfarm income and capital provided to slowly build her enterprise up.
Sitima’s first loans came from a businesswomen’s organization, which made small loans to groups of women who each served as guarantors for the others. She says not many other farmers in the district have this kind of access to finance or encouragement, but this is changing.
As a member of the RWA, she’s working to help find support for other, less fortunate, women to build themselves up, connecting them to microfinance institutions and NGO projects that provide funding and training.
RWA’s Malawi chapter launched in 2016 and now has more than 2,000 members. Sitima says through the network, she has been able to learn from experiences of women farmers from across Southern Africa.
“Their ideas helped us start planting bananas around the fish ponds to preserve water, and introduce plantains to capitalize on growing demand,” she says.
Sitima tells Mongabay that owning land was the most important step toward her success and wants more of the women farmers in her district to have title to the land they cultivate.
“I think we have achieved this because of stability. When you are renting land or expect someone to push you out anytime, you can’t implement your ideas,” she says.
She says women having land title should not be misunderstood as disrespecting men. “It’s about empowering a section of society that’s a force in food production, for the benefit of everyone,” she says.
“My husband realized this. We work hard together and he now jokes to others that I am the ATM of our family.”
Banner image: Diana Sitima at her farm. Image by Charles Mpaka for Mongabay.
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