Johannesburg - During this past festive season, young, thousands, if not millions, of women overwhelmed salons in desperation to look beautiful and stylish, but this was not the case for a young teacher from Nongoma, Zululand.
She opted for a dirty appearance and pungent smell just to grow her newly-established pig farming and pork trading businesses.
At the age of 29, Siphelele Siyaya does not even think of conforming to peer pressure by spending her money on fashion and fine-tuning her beauty. On weekends and holidays, when she is not teaching maths and geography at Esiqiwini High School in Mtubatuba, she spends almost all her time taking care of her precious livestock or slaughtering them for sale at the local informal market.
Her pig farming and pork trading operates under her Madlikivane Piggery company.
Siyaya says she spends most of her spare time cleaning the pigpen and pigs. “Every day, I am dirty and smelly. I have even stopped doing manicures because long nails would break when I cleaned my pigs or slaughter them.
“My long nails do not last for a week, which is why I stopped doing them, especially during the December holidays. I gave up – due to the increased demand for pork.”
She started her business by building a pigpen – which has the capacity to hold up to 60 swines – in 2021 and started the actual livestock farming in August 2021.
She thanked Nongoma Municipality for funding the construction of the pigpen.
Siyaya is one of many young people across the country who are showcasing their passion for agriculture on a Twitter platform called Agriculture and Young @Agric. The account demonstrated that South Africa is not short of agricultural skills from young people who are working hard to supply the country with food.
Siyaya studied mining, which was her passion, at the University of the Witwatersrand, but dropped out because of financial constraints. She then went to the University of Zululand to obtain a bachelor of science degree in hydrology and geography.
She then went to the United States on the hydrology exchange programme for two years but dropped it after realising that she did not really like hydrology.
In 2020, she was prevented by the outbreak of Covid-19 from going to China to teach English. She then opted to enrol at the University of Natal to do a postgraduate certificate in education, which led to her becoming a qualified teacher the following year.
“Initially, I wanted to be a mining engineer, but then financial difficulties happened, and life happened, and hopefully, at some point, I will complete my qualification because I have two more years to finish,” Siyaya said.
With this huge passion to study, it never crossed Siyaya’s mind to study agriculture, but it came as a gift from her now 82-year-old grandmother, Nina Mkhwanazi, who used to raise and sell pigs and chickens. However, she still believes that formal agricultural academic qualifications are partly necessary.
“To have qualifications would help you to know lots of things, and not because I am also doing it, although I don’t have qualifications. But I have quite a number of friends who are in the industry, and I get a lot of advice from them as they would say you should try this and try that,” she says.
Before venturing into the pork business, she attempted poultry farming but withdrew after realising that the competition was tight.
Although, for now, she only relies on her teaching salary to recapitalise her farm and spends between R5 000 and R8 000 a month buying feed for the pigs, Siyaya believes that in the near future, she will get the spin-offs. To avoid the huge costs of buying feed, she has acquired land for a mealie plantation.
Like a number of South Africans, Siyaya’s business has been badly affected by Eskom’s rolling load shedding as she is forced to hire a generator to keep deep freezers cold enough for the meat to be frozen for her to be able to slice it.
Her target market is local residents who are visiting her homestead to buy meat, but the bigger ones are street vendors who buy almost every day. For now, she is avoiding entering into trading agreements with normal butcheries as she is still completing the construction of a formal slaughterhouse.