Farmer Tests Waters With New Potato Seed
Lebogang Baingapi | Monday April 3, 2017 18:00
Serinane-based Seate says she has become the first farmer in Botswana to plant potatoes using seeds and not the usually tubers.
Last year, she went to an agriculture fair outside Botswana and she found a potato seed called True Potato Seed (TPS), which has never been used in Botswana. After hearing success stories about the seeds particularly in India, she bought it and approached the agricultural department to assist on how that can be possible to be planted in Botswana.
“I conducted workshops at the farm to engage other farmers on the new development and the response has been positive. We experimented with it and we are optimistic of a good harvest,” she explained.
Seate further outlined that the disadvantages of using a tuber is that it is bulky and prone to diseases as opposed to a TPS, which is diseaseresistant and has potential to produce between 1.5 to 2kg of potatoes per bolt or 30 to 34 tonnes of potatoes per hectare. The currently used tubers across Botswana are imported in bags from South Africa.
She expects the good harvest as it takes approximately 95 days to be ready and encouraged more farmers to come on board.
She went ahead to call an expert from Zimbabwe to help her facilitate the new method and teach other farmers about the benefits of switching to the new TPS method. Neo who together with her husband Setso, own a farm in Serinane are passionate farmers who are into horticultural commercial farming, where they keep small livestock and grow different kinds of vegetables and other crops for sale.
They are known in Kweneng for supplying irrigated maize and watermelons way ahead of other farmers who rely on natural rain for their yield. Though she does not have any formal training in farming, she counts on passion and determination as her driving key to success. The mother of two who is also an employee at Jwaneng mine, points out that it only takes passion and determination to succeed in such a challenging path.
“We should kill a stereotype that farming is dirty and is only done at retirement age. We should teach our kids that the industry can be commercialised and actually put food on table,” she said. She has been active in the agri-business since 2013 and her farm has been a major supplier of agri-foods to major supermarkets, individuals and street vendors. She scooped an award last year in farming and this year she has been nominated for the best youth in farming in the upcoming Botswana Youth Awards.
She is thrilled by the nomination, adding that it will add a cherry on top of her achievements of making an impact on other people’s lives through farming. Seate‘s dream is to empower other women and the youth to turn to farming and she has been placing students on internship at the farm to learn about the prospects of commercial farming. Though some were University students, others were out-of-school youth whom she recruited to teach about agri-business.
“We usually conduct workshops at the farm to teach other farmers about any new developments in the farming industry. We also donate some of our produce to the less privileged as part of our social responsibility in our community,” she explained.
Though there has been a challenge of climate change and the recent heavy rains affecting the vegetables, Seate is a proud beneficiary of Government programmes that aim to empower citizens to feed the country. She was funded through the LIMID programme for fencing to a tune of P37,000 and partly funded through ISPAAD horticulture at an amount of P64,000 in 2016. This enabled her to buy irrigation materials and she further drilled a borehole. Seate believes that farming is fashionable and should be driven by passion and the power to make change by feeding the nation.