Buhle's Farm Project - South Africa

The end of apartheid has been a mixed blessing for black South Africans. Although no longer held down by racist practices, they are struggling to emerge into economic independence in a country with crushing unemployment of almost 50 percent.

Farming is one possible solution, but in agricultural communities like Delmas, resistance has been strong because people remember hard, poorly paid years laboring on the farms of others.

A Monsanto Fund grant has provided for a pioneering effort to change that mindset -- the Buhle Farmer's Academy of Monsanto's Food, Health and Hope Foundation. At the academy, people who never before had been in a position to be commercial farmers, learn a variety of farming skills, quite literally from the ground up.

"We want to give people with a keen interest in farming and the potential to own land some hands-on training that will give them an idea of what this is all about," explains Willie Maree, who is overseeing the program for Monsanto.

In fact, program participants get a very broad exposure to both the technical and the business side of farming: On the technical side they plant and care for a small plot of land through a growing season of crops like corn, dried beans, sorghum and sunflowers. On the business side, they take classes in courses such as farm management, entrepreneurship and budgeting.

After only a few months the Farmer's Academy has been so successful that there is a move in the National Department of Agriculture to require anyone thinking of going into farming to participate in a program like the academy.

The reports from Delmas are equally as enthusiastic.

"This is something totally new, where people have started to gather, with the opportunity to do something good for themselves," Maree says. "Community leaders are saying to us, 'We have seen the birth of a new development for our people.' That makes it all worthwhile."