Small business

Sylvia Dampies and Elizabeth Abrams, Hands-On Fish Farming Cooperative, Dennegoer Plaas, Grabouw, Western Cape

In Grabouw, the Hands-On Fish Farming Cooperative is successfully harvesting its rainbow trout. The new black commercial fish farmers are low-wage farm laborers, previously earning between ZAR 300 and 500 a month, in addition to receiving farm housing and schools. On each farm, the workers selected for the project (on the basis of need, skill and motivation) constitute their own cooperative, and direct their own activities.

The cooperative serves as an umbrella for the member projects on each participating farm, and sells the fish to the processor and apportions profits to the coop members. The combination of bottom-up initiative and project management with centrally coordinated selling and sourcing of materials has worked well. Twenty-three of the first 25 harvests were plentiful.

Stellenbosch University provided early financial support in addition to training in agricultural techniques — such as mixing the particular ingredients of feed according to the age and biomass of the fish, and harvesting. They also implemented financial management skills and tried hard to encourage savings. When farmers receive dividends for the first time, each one may receive in the vicinity of $280 – the equivalent of between four and five months’ wages. The university advisors helped the fish farmers to identify their options.

One long-term goal of many families is to acquire sufficient funds to purchase their own homes on land separate from the farms where they work. This is not easy, given the fact that nearly all the fertile agricultural land in the area is privately owned and the challenge of the government’s willing seller – willing buyer policy does not find much land available for purchase by these families. An even more widely shared goal is to educate the community’s children so that they will not have to labor like their parents on farms they do not own.

Sylvia and Elizabeth reached their nets deep into the treated plastic vat of fat and recently tranquilized rainbow trout just harvested from the reservoir in large nets by the men. Then they heaved the netfuls of fish into a truck piled high with ice, ready to carry the fish to their buyer. All of the groups are workers on the Dennegoer Plaas fruit farm, and members of the Hands-On Fish Farming Cooperative. It was 6 a.m. and they finished before reporting before reporting to their jobs on the farm. This was their third trout harvest, and they were hopeful that it would be even more successful than the previous ones.

“We are really pressured when we have to harvest our fish and the farmers’ apples at the same time,” noted Elizabeth. “But at least our older children help with the little ones.” The children attend a farm school for their elementary education, where the government has taken responsibility for improving the previously inferior school. Sylvia says there is an advantage, since there are only 15 to 20 students in a class. When they transfer to attend the local high school, it is harder for them, since the classes are much larger.

Seventeen years ago, Sylvia and Elizabeth traveled 150 kilometers to Grabouw from Riviersonderend (“river without end” in Afrikans, which is spoken here). They had heard there was work nearer to Cape Town, and ended up on the farm.

Sylvia and Elizabeth, like the other members of the cooperative, work extremely hard. They must feed the fish twice a day – at 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.—without fail for six months. In the process they grow the trout from tiny fingerlings into plump fish between 10 and 15 inches long.

“We believe in the project, and we have lots of hope. It must succeed. I need to put my kids through school. And I would like to drive and have a car…What you put in is what you get out.”