A budding farmer in Edendale, Pietermaritzburg KwaZulu-Natal is looking to spread her wings after experiencing rapid growth in her chicken farming operation.
Ntobeko Mafu, 23, is the founder and managing director of Madame Clucks A Lot, a small-scale farming enterprise, employing seven people.
The enterprise is an organic farming company that produces broiler and layer chickens, cultivates vegetables and provides farming training services. Mafu is also an author, having published her first book ‘Letters to whoever needs to hear this: notes from me’ in 2019.
Mafu’s journey began in 2019 when she was 18 years old following the passing of her father, an avid subsistence farmer.
“The land that I am operating on was my dad’s. When he passed on, our family circumstances changed. He used to grow food we would consume in the house, but it all dried up when he passed on. There was a visible change within the household,” she said.
Despite lacking the skills and not having prior ambitions for farming, she was determined to continue where he had left off. She decided to take on the journey which was initially to feed the family with her produce.
Impressed by the feedback from her family and community, she decided to scale up.
Despite her determination, she concedes that the business, has not been without its challenges. Chief among these was being a young woman in a male- dominated industry.
“On top of that, I now employ people and I often have to deal with personnel issues. You hire people when they are desperate for work and that’s well and good, but once they start working they start to undermine me as a woman. When that happens, I am forced to let them go,” she said.
In 2023, Mafu, an alumnus of the Durban University of Technology’s (DUT) Innobiz Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, was elected as a delegate to attend the prestigious Asia World Model United Nations (AWMUN) Offline Conference in Thailand.
“I was selected to speak about food insecurity in South Africa. To go there I also received support from the National Youth Development Agency [NYDA] and the Msunduzi Local Municipality – which gave me pocket money for the trip. Everything else was financed by the AWMUN.”
The NYDA has also assisted Madame Clucks A Lot with equipment to the value of R50 000. This included feeders, pluckers, lights and feed.
To date, the business produces 600 broilers per cycle. These are mostly supplied to local resellers and individual customers.
With her backyard space quickly running out, Mafu has ambitions of moving to a bigger farm which, she says, will allow her to reach her full potential of becoming a commercial farmer.
“I want to own the whole value chain. I want to produce my feed and have my own
abattoir,” she concluded.
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