For Thulani Magida, the owner of Juta Agritech, every dawn marks a new chapter in the ever-evolving journey of farming. Armed with a master’s in agricultural economics and an MBA, this Eastern Cape farmer leverages his qualifications to provide invaluable services such as budgeting and business plans to fellow farmers.
He has expanded his business to include agri-consulting services, providing agricultural and economic services specifically tailored to support new-era farmers.
Magida cultivates vegetables and operates a piggery on seven of 10 hectares of communal land. His journey from three hectares last year to the current scale reflects a remarkable expansion in a relatively short period.
“I focus on farming, with butternut, pumpkin, cabbage, and potatoes as my main crop. My aim is to grow my business through education schemes, partnerships, and leasing additional land. I plan to rotate potatoes with other vegetables and grains to increase production. I currently also make money from pigs but I need to scale up to make money from feed.”
Competing with the best
“We use a dual market system, and everything that we have harvested, we sell. But the biggest challenge in the markets is that we don’t have the equipment necessary to compete in them.
“Our potatoes are still bagged in unbranded, generic bags. We have to compete with commercial farmers who have access to everything and we don’t have anything. But we still have to compete in the same market. So it’s very difficult to compete in those markets,” Magida says.
On the piggery side, he can sell eight pigs every two months. Currently, he is not breeding. Instead, he buys weaner piglets, raises them, and sells them after seven months.
Training other farmers
Magida points out that he farms on communal land which was started in 2022 by a financier. In 2023, he decided to leave his job in the private sector to focus on the business as the managing director.
“I grew up in a village with a farmer father and pursued education in math, physics, and biology before focusing on agricultural economics. After working for the department of agriculture for six years and a private company that focuses on commercialising farmers for nine years, I decided to quit my job to focus on business and creating jobs,” he says.
“I’ve basically been in agriculture my entire life. I was an operations manager when I decided to quit working so that I could involve myself in business, create jobs, try to create value, and put the irrigation systems that we have to productive use. I’ve been trying to establish businesses after learning from my previous work.”
Magida highlights that his qualifications have always grounded him because, from them, he learned production economics. He wants to play a leading role in transforming new-era farmers into commercialising farmers.
“I don’t only want to provide one element of what is needed to commercialise a farm. I want to provide training. Today, there is a lot of technology but for emerging farmers, accessing technology has always been a problem because it’s expensive,” he explains.
“So if businesses like Juta Agritech can have access to finance to buy, the technology can have the skills to utilise it, then it will bypass the three hindrances that are there so we can provide the technology to emerging farmers. Then they can also be efficient and productive so that they can compete much better in the commercial market. On the other side, I’m also consulting, so I’m doing budgets, cash flows, and business plans.”
Creating jobs
As Magida navigates the challenges of a startup business, he discusses three challenges he faces: access to finance, labour, and markets.
“As a startup business, you are too young to not be considered a risk. The business has been in business for less than two years. No one wants to give you funding. So that is the biggest challenge,” says Magida.
He currently uses his pension fund to help him out financially and says he is now at a critical stage where he needs to have access to finance.
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Meanwhile, investing back into his workers remains a priority for Magida. He identified two students and two unemployed graduates. The one has a horticulture qualification, and the other is in agriculture engineering.
“So the other one I’m grooming for irrigation, and the young lady who is also a horticulturist, I’m grooming her as an assistant farm manager.”
To him, the most rewarding aspect of running a small business is creating jobs. He shares that he took his own money, including his children’s, wife’s, and pension, to start the business. In January, he created jobs for 44 people on 3½ hectares of land without any support.
“We managed to create jobs for 44 people. That’s massive with no support. As a start-up business in communal areas, when people see that you are doing things the right way, they want to be part of your business. For me, that was a great achievement, and obviously, that’s coming from posting the good work that we are doing on the LinkedIn platform.”
Plans for diversification
Diversification is essential for businesses to ensure a balance of resources and avoid falling flat, he stresses.
“Our cabbage didn’t perform well because of several reasons. If I didn’t have potatoes and butternuts, I would have gone under. But fortunately, we have potatoes, and they performed well.
“The price was good, the yield was good, the quality was good, and the butternuts were good. So that already gives you a good balance in terms of if one crop fails, then you have other crops, so diversification is important on that basis alone. Then you can take it further now to say, rather than focusing on farming alone, let me also diversify further.”
Magida also wants to venture into providing drone technology as a service to farmers.
“I can demonstrate how to spray, and I can say it’s working on my farm, so it works there as well. And then, if I’m doing a budget, I can show that this is the spray programme that’s costing so much, and this is how it filters into the entire business in terms of cash flows and so on. It helps when one is being hit hard by a challenge so that the business doesn’t fall flat,” he says.
Goals and plans
Magida says he sees himself continuing as a vegetable farmer.
“I still want to grow them, and the business strategy now is to use potatoes as the key strategy driver or strategic crop that we can expand, trying to bring more and more land into production. I’m also looking for a farm that I can buy and own, which also helps with making long-term decisions because, currently, we are on communal land, so it’s a risk on its own.
“I would also love to do long-term or permanent crops like your citrus. I have experience in citrus farming and macadamia nut farming.”
He emphasises that the overall dream of the business is to become a one-stop shop for new-era farmers.
“The final goal is to be an integrator, creating brands that integrate into the value chain and ensuring that value is not lost from the farm to retail. This will involve integrating small farmers’ produce into a brand, allowing the farmer to grow from there.”
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