“In Zimbabwe, we have a mentality that the youth has, they think that you need lots of land to be able to start a farming business, so this has been very good, you know, with a little bit of space you can actually produce a lot of vegetables and produce which you can use to generate an income,” Tinodaishe Violet Mukarati states.
She is on duty today at the farm store and is also doubling up as a farmer. The 28-year-old is the elder of two daughters in a family of three. Mukarati’s mother, Venensia Mukarati, is a bookkeeper and single mother who decided to start farming in 2017.
An initial foray into larger-scale farming on land far from the city quickly turned out to be impractical.
While doing research on how she could farm closer to home - and find a way to draw her daughters into the business - Venensia came across hydroponics. Here, she decided, was an option that would not require loads of room and would allow for a far more hands-on approach, even for someone living in the city.
A lot of lessons later, plus some $6,000 in investments and the family has a thriving hydroponics business, with two main facilities, one in the grounds of the family home in Borrowdale and the other near the Pomona fresh produce market in Harare.
“At the moment with our project, we have 4500 plants per cycle. Prior to COVID-19, we were making about USD1500 per month. However the pandemic has really affected our revenue and we are now making about plus or minus half of what we used to make before COVID-19,” Tinodaishe explained.
Read the complete article at www.monitor.co.ug.