Dietmar Joosten is the hands-on farm manager of Emseni Farming. He and his team are constantly busy with projects that benefit the community. Dietmar is a community builder who works with his community by teaching them how to farm successfully. Apart from having an active community outreach program in which they teach and help locals how to farm successfully, they launched a community vegetable garden in collaboration with the KZN Premier’s office last year. They teach youngsters how to use a small empty area and turn it into a vegetable garden.
Community vegetable gardens are not a new concept, but how Dietmar and his team at Emseni Farming do it is unique. Dietmar implemented the project in collaboration with several stakeholders, and it is growing in popularity. They teach the youth how to plant vegetables in small gardens at home and schools. Approximately 3,000 youngsters were each gifted seedlings in 2022 to kick off their home gardens. They were shown how to plant and care for the seedlings. They were encouraged to plant enough for themselves and to help neighbours. Dietmar and his team showed the young people a video of how to prepare a small garden in their backyards, fertilize it, and plant the seedlings. They demonstrated how they can use empty plastic bottles to create a mini hothouse to keep the young plants healthy while growing.
“I want to encourage you to grow your vegetable gardens so you can help care for your families,” Dietmar told the youngsters during training. “In this way, you can help yourselves, and you can also help others. Maybe you can later pursue careers in food security”.
Subsistence farming, where community members produce enough for themselves and their neighbours, is one of the productive ways in which young people can start from a very young age to make the most significant impact. The youth make up a considerable portion of South African communities. The younger they start, the more successful the country will be in helping communities to help themselves. Agriculture is one sector in which people can find meaningful employment, and the sooner they start learning how to do it, the better it gets.
Emseni Farming is situated in the Kranskop area in KwaZulu-Natal, where jobs are scarce, and most communities rely on agriculture to make a living. The program is practical and aims to address the challenges of poverty by teaching them the skills needed to help themselves.
But this is not where Dietmar’s contribution to the community ends. He also ran a successful bee farming at Emseni and started to help communities with bee farming. Emseni Farming has a memorandum of understanding with the Maphumulo Tropical Cooperation to provide training and mentorship programs to upcoming local farmers. The membership of the cooperation is growing annually. It now has over forty local community farmers as part of the program, who are assisted in how to farm avocados and help sell them.
(Read more about the successful Emseni agricultural projects in Devoted magazine. Follow the link for Issue 36: https://online.pubhtml5.com/asxvv/fsqr/ and Issue 37: https://online.pubhtml5.com/asxvv/pgfx/)
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