Corporate Social Review Magazine 1st Quarter 2012 | Page 34

MediaClubSouthAfrica.com success and mitigate the Group’s credit risk. “Our intimate acquaintance with farming clients and capacity to provide farming inputs, requisites and services, allows the business to extend credit to emerging clients on the premise that it is linked to training and mentorship programmes,” says Goosen Lombard, AFGRI’s dedicated black farmer relationship manager. “We regularly run mentorship programmes for summer crops such as soya, maize and sunflower.” The need to utilise South Africa’s fairly limited productive land to capacity highlights the need to support emerging black commercial farmers. “As we support a well-co-ordinated, focussed approach, AFGRI is targeting the creation of a small number of successful commercial farmers rather than a multitude of small scale subsistence farmers,” adds Goosen. The Buhle Farmers’ Academy (BFA) is a working example of how positive development can be engendered in the lives of beneficiaries, by way of an effective partner support project. To negate the trend of productive farming land going to waste because of bad farm management, AFGRI has partnered with the BFA since 2008, sponsoring the establishment of a poultry training facility and a revamped student centre. 32 “We also provide on-going operational funding,” says Harris. “In 2011, we sponsored R265 000, and in addition, we underwrite the BFA’s pig and poultry feeds credit facility to the value of R120,000.” Located on a 150 ha farm, Leeuwpoort, near Delmas in Mpumalanga, the BFA addresses a critical need to equip farmers with the practical competencies required for commercial farming by offering a sound theoretical knowledge base, hands-on practical production skills, training in farm business management and life skills. “It is obligatory for prospective students to already own land or have access to land, before they start the training. This means that they can go back into their community after completion of the course, and immediately start applying what was learnt,” adds Harris. Running a successful farming business is by no means an easy task. That is why AFGRI has also partnered in a BEE farming public-private partnershipwith the Bethlehem Farmers Trust (BFT), to help nurture a crop of new black farmers that has defied the odds and today produces apples for Europe. AlthoughBethlehem is not natural apple-growing area; the success of this initiative has positioned the BFT as CORPORATE SOCIAL REVIEW