Banda: A Self-Made Jam Master
Cavin Kanoko | Monday November 2, 2020 12:55
For her, it is an income generating undertaking which helps put bread on the table for the mother of three, an entrepreneur who runs the Berry Space.
She started the business, which is located in Ramotswa in 2018. She explained to MonitorBusiness that though she had strawberry farming in mind, she had at the time opted to start the project by cultivating common vegetables.
These included rape, spinach and tomatoes as a means to get used to the trade first.
“I am a backyard gardener based in Ramotswa,” Banda said of the business.
“….I have been fortunate to inherit from my late parents a developed residential plot of 1, 500sqm which, I have demarcated into two and use the other part for horticulture and also where the strawberries are planted used to be an orchard that boasted several fruit trees such as peaches, oranges, fig trees, pomegranate, lemons, oranges and mulberries.”
Banda further pointed out that there was also a small vegetable garden at the back of the orchard where they planted maize, beans and watermelons.
She said by the time her parents passed on, most of the fruit trees were either dead or non-fruitful. “I then decided to de-bush all the old trees and turn the whole place into a vegetable garden. That was in Jan 2018.”Banda was prompted by the desire to try and continue the legacy of her parents which included the up-keep of ‘greens’ of some sort, without necessarily resuscitating the orchard.
“I then planted those for a year while on the side I researched on strawberry farming and liaised with others in the same space in Zimbabwe and South Africa on how to go about it. As soon as I thought that I had gathered enough guidance, that is in November of 2018, I stopped the production of the said vegetables and started my berry journey,” she said. Banda also opened about the challenges she has faced since starting her business. They included an instance where the whole shading net collapsed following a storm and damaged most of the vegetables six months into the project. She was forced to re-construct the whole net and replaced some part of it.
She ordered 200 of her first strawberry seedlings from Zimbabwe and 95% of them died after a month, and she said this brought a lot of angst as to what went wrong.
She ended up having to start all over again, but this time with close and regular monitoring from an expert she had engaged.
She also had to dedicate more time to the project which conflicted with her daily job. This meant that from work she would focus on the project which robbed her of resting time.
With the advice from the expert, she started looking for more mature seedlings as they tended to have a higher survival rate.
She started her search locally, a search that revealed that there were quite a number of people with some strawberry plants at their homes, in small numbers but were not keen on expanding on the business. “I then gathered up to 50 mature seedlings of the Chandler variety, which is suitable for the Botswana climate and from the 50 seedlings I managed to propagate, over a period of four months, over 2, 000 seedlings, 1, 700 of which filled up my entire garden and the rest were sold. The survival rate of the seedlings I propagated was 75% which is a good rate.”
According to Banda, the most expensive resource that she procured at the beginning of the project was the shade net and its accessories.
Other inputs were the drip-line system, the underground water reservoir, the 5000ML Jojo tank used as water backup, two water pumps, the trailer and its 1200L Jojo tank. The total cost was about P50, 000.
To sell her produce, Banda has to travel back and forth between Ramotswa and Gaborone.
With the strawberries being highly perishable fruits that required minimum handling under low temperatures, hence it presented logistical difficulties.
Taking into consideration the logistical challenge, she was only able to sell the fresh strawberries on the day of the harvest. At most three days, after harvest day.
The unsold ones must either be frozen, dried or go into jam making, juice making, ice-cream and dried fruits packaging.
The Berry Space has one full-time employee but engages two casual workers during a bumper harvest. Banda said COVID-19 negatively affected her business during the four weeks of the first lockdown.
The disruption led to her losing close to 50kg of berries as most of them were spoilt in the garden as it was not easy to access the market. A good harvest can go up to 30kg of berries and she sells them for P15 a punnet of 250g fresh ones, P12 a cup of dried ones, P50 for 1.5kg of frozen ones, P35 and P30 for 400ml, 375ml bottle of Strawberry and Lemon Homemade Jam respectively.
Her customer base is made up of individuals and small establishments that are in the business of yoghurt, smoothies, juice, ice-cream jam, bakery, and dried fruits packaging.
Banda said she is working on exploring other berries such as blueberries and she has already planted mulberry trees and she is also exploring moving to hydroponics despite the limited space.
“My advice to small entrepreneurs, emanating from experience with this project, is that it is easy to focus on the production process and get it right and only think about branding and marketing at the end,” she said.