Nthabiseng Mkhize Turned an Abandoned School Field into Soweto’s Organic Farm

By Kekeletso Nkele, small.news Assistant

Nthabiseng is a part of the Silver Lining global community thanks to support from Nedbank’s SimplyBiz.

(small.news) — Nthabiseng Mkhize is not a farmer by training. Before 2019, she and her husband, Gregory, were marketing agents for a vitamin company, building a living far removed from soil and seedlings.

When Covid collapsed their supply chains and brought that chapter to a close, they came home to Soweto, and Nthabiseng looked at her community with eyes sharpened by absence. What she saw were neighbors without work, without skills, and without reliable access to nutritious food.

“We saw the need,” she says. Those three words became the founding statement of Siyoyisile Indlala Community Farm and Projects, today a dual-certified organic operation on land leased from a Soweto primary school, where produce sales, training, and certification work together as its business model. From there, the farm’s restoration work began.

Sand that became soil, a restoration built without shortcuts. Rather than reaching for synthetic inputs to fast-track a solution, she rebuilt it the slow way, she says. Those three words became the founding statement of Siyoyisile Indlala Community Farm and Projects, today a dual-certified organic operation on land leased from a Soweto primary school. With aesthetic inputs to fast-track a solution, she rebuilt it the slow way: digging deep trenches and filling them with cardboard for carbon, bones collected from street vendors for calcium, tin cans for iron, food waste, leaves, branches, and mulch layered on top.

It was laborious, methodical, and almost entirely free. And it was the decision that set the tone for everything that followed. Nthabiseng’s soil, she says, will remain fertile for over 20 years. The farm now holds dual organic certification from both the Participatory Guarantee System and the South African Organic Sector Organization, a status that allows Siyoyisile Indlala to sell certified organic produce and to audit and certify other farms in the area.

“What feels ordinary to one person may be extraordinary to another.” — Nthabiseng Mkhize, CEO, Siyoyisile Indlala Community Farm

Nthabiseng’s Invention for Households with No Garden

Inside the farm’s growing tunnel, Nthabiseng oversees the production of seedlings using a technique she developed herself: the snail method. Seeds are planted in soil rolled inside plastic, the way one might roll sushi, dense, water-efficient seedlings that can be sold at R20 to R30 each. The design is deliberate. Each seedling is intended for households, not fields. Planted in a cut two-liter cool drink bottle that replicates the farm’s dual root zone system, it can sit on a windowsill, a balcony, or any small surface. No garden, no growing experience required.

This is where Nthabiseng’s vision becomes most visible. The farm is not simply producing food; it is producing the means for a community to produce its own. Every Saturday, 64 children from Faranani Primary and their parents come to learn. They leave with bottle systems, seedlings, soil, and knowledge of how to use them, along with a meal cooked from what was harvested on-site that morning. Some send back photographs of what they have grown at home.

A Circular System That Buys Almost Nothing

Rabbit droppings are sold as organic fertilizer at R500 for 50kg. Residents who bring food waste or urine receive a discount on fresh produce. The urine is processed with comfrey for at least 7 days to produce a high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer called bio-nitrate. School field grass becomes mulch. Heirloom seeds, some over 50 years old, are saved from each harvest and replanted or sold. Gregory Mkhize puts it plainly: “Everything here rotates itself.”

Leading Without a Funder

Nthabiseng runs Siyoyisile Indlala almost entirely on what the farm generates. She pays six community employees, feeds 64 children every Saturday, and maintains the tunnel and outdoor growing beds without a regular external funder. That self-sustaining approach is central to the model. “We buy everything with our own money,” Gregory says. “We pay these people with the money that we are creating.” It is a business model built on genuine self-sufficiency, not as an ideology, but as a daily operational reality.

The City of Johannesburg has recognized the farm with a Township Economic Impact Award and committed to providing six shipping containers for an on-site organic shop, eatery, and food-processing facility. Nthabiseng and Gregory are in the process of pitching for a 13-hectare plot nearby that would significantly expand what they can grow, employ, and teach. In the meantime, the kitchen that feeds children each week is a shed with a gas burner, and hail damage has left much of the crop exposed to the elements.

None of that diminishes what Nthabiseng has built. From a strip of chemically depleted school ground, with no farming background and no external capital, she has created a certified organic operation, a skills training program, a seedling distribution network, an online academy with 150 monthly learners, and a model she and Gregory believe can be replicated in townships across the country.

“Our programs count as a skill for life.” — Nthabiseng Mkhize, CEO, Siyoyisile Indlala Community Farm

Proof That it Can Be Done

For small business owners reading this from anywhere in the world, the Siyoyisile Indlala story offers more than inspiration. It offers a replicable architecture: identify a community need, secure access to underused land or resources, build a circular system that generates its own inputs, and distribute not just products but the knowledge to produce them. Nthabiseng Mkhize did not wait for funding, a business plan, or the right conditions. She saw the need, started digging, and let the soil do the rest.

“If it can happen here,” Gregory says, “it can happen in all the communities.” Nthabiseng already knows it can. She built the proof.

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