Mpho from Sustainable Abundance Permaculture

Tell us a little about yourself!

I grew up in Bloemfontein, but now live in Tarlton. I studied philosophy and media studies at Wits. I love science and the arts!

Both sides of my family had strong connections to farming and homesteading. Eventually my dad bought his own farm when I was in high school, so I learned lot about agriculture from there but was never a fan of the industrial agriculture that most farmers think they have to practice.

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

A long time ago, I came across permaculture via a Geoff Lawton documentary, and it just clicked. Permaculture design opened the door to various fields of sustainability but especially food and food security.

I started SA Permaculture (Sustainable Abundance Permaculture) with a friend of mine after we did our permaculture design course through Serenity Permaculture. We both wanted new ways to encourage sustainability and environmentalism. The company itself was geared design, implementation (farm and garden) and training. We've stepped out of private gardens and have shifted to farm sustainability, community development instead, but still do training courses and events.

Like most BA students, I wanted to save the world, but wasn't satisfied with media and journalism, so made the transition to permaculture because I felt was more directly helpful.

Networking has been a big part of my journey since my permaculture training. From working with Serenity Permaculture to Food and Trees for Africa, SOASO and PGS South Africa. It's brought me many of the contacts and sources for materials, plants and livestock. As well as opportunities to teach and work. Right now I've spent about four years building a network of farms and communities around the countries where we aim to test our farming model (once we get the funding).

The networked growing system I am working on is similar to what Sociotech is currently doing, training and supporting communities to grow on a hectare or less then combining their output to sell for large-scale offtakes. I've worked with them to try and meet a few offtake requests. The models I'm working on launching are similar but with a 5ha farm/training site to support the community's homestead farmers and a centralized 100ha(min) farm to support 5-6 of the 5ha community farms.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

All the people we at SA Permaculture have introduced to Permaculture and sustainable practices through our courses and workshops

What is the most helpful piece of advice you received when you were just starting out? 

"Use small slow solutions" the 9th principle of permaculture. We often burn out or get lost trying to do everything at the same time, or at least I do. The small solutions are often the most stable and resilient, and they build on each other over time into something big and successful.

What advice would you like to give to others who are younger/earlier on their journey? 

Connect and network effectively. i.e. we get more done as a collective than as individuals

Where do you see growing going in South Africa? 

Honestly I am not sure, but I'd like to see it go in the direction of sustainable networked growing systems like the farming models I've developed.