13 Aug 2024

Kwenantle Farmers, leasee of Talana Farms, are the biggest producers of the fodder crop nationally, with 86 hectares of Lucerne currently cultivated, according to the company director Ms Lembie Tlhalerwa.

 The company started with planting 30 hectares of the crop in 2019 following a discussion between directors in 2018 to consider growing the crop which is direly needed by farmers in the region.  The region is prone to droughts, which forces the farmers to feed their livestock in times of dire need.  “One day, Peter came to me and said, ‘Lembie, I think we should do lucerne.

 Then he came with seeds, put them in field three, watered them and that was a game changer,” said Ms Tlhalerwa during the ground breaking of the solar expansion project at Talana Farms, recently.

“Today, somewhere down the line, everybody realised what we realised in 2018 that you cannot have a livestock industry without fodder industry,” she added.

 The 30 hectares planted in 2019 yielded 125 tonnes of Lucerne monthly and from the 86 hectares currently planted, Kwenantle Farmers expect 292 tonnes a month.

“As we’re sitting here today, Kwenantle Farmers is the biggest producer of Lucerne in the country and dare, I say, we’re the only ones who know how to do it right,” Ms Tlhalerwa said.

 She said her greatest takeaway, even after a horrible day in office, was seeing small trucks dubbed ‘matshelonyana’ loaded with Lucerne from their farms and headed to feeding livestock that would otherwise perish without feed.

Ms Tlhalerwa said it also gave them joy when they realised that they had accorded farmers, in Bobirwa especially, access to the feed that was otherwise a preserve for commercial farmers with the financial power to purchase from outside the region.

 In their continued production of fodder without losing a lot of funds to electricity, Kwenantle Farmers  embarked upon solar expansion project to among other things power their boreholes.

Dubbed a sustainable enterprise in agriculture, the one megawatt solar plant is expected to greatly reduce reliance on electricity from Botswana Power Corporation, amongst other things, according to assistant minister of agriculture, Mr Molebatsi Molebatsi.

The plant is also tipped to greatly reduce carbon footprint in the farm while also feeding efforts towards mitigation of effects of climate change.  With a total cost of development at P27 million fully funded by Stanbic Bank, the assistant minister made the farmers aware that there was a component of Temo Letlotlo that assisted farmers in fodder production.

Although cognisant of the fact that the loan component may not be sufficient, the assistant minister said that large scale farmers like Kwenantle qualified for P10 million government subsidised loan which could be blended with loans from the private sector.

For his part, Bobirwa Member of Parliament, Mr Taolo Lucas commended Kwenantle Farmers for delving into the right business track of planting a fodder crop.

 “These endless droughts have emptied our kraals and hopefully, many farmers will benefit from purchasing fodder from your facility to sustain their livestock,” said Mr Lucas who said Bobirwa farmers would regain their pride in livestock.  Also, the MP congratulated the company for undertaking a solar project, saying it was a fitting step in the days where the world talked climate change and called for mitigation of its effects.  However, the MP who lauded Kwenantle Farmers’s solar project, was concerned by the slow pace on the uptake of solar projects nationally. ENDS