Corporate Social Review Magazine 1st Quarter 2012 | Page 34

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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.

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“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

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