A quiet rebellion is taking root in rural South Africa. Led by women armed not with tractors or chemicals, but with seeds, soil, and agroecological knowledge, this movement rejects the export-led farming model that has long dictated what they grow and how they live. This agroecological resistance is feeding bellies and a growing rural resilience, one food garden at a time. Letter from their farms by Natasha Foote.
“It is called sex planting,” Auntie Flora announces, gesturing proudly at the squashes trailing the ground at our feet. Together with the Women on Farms Project, we’re standing somewhere in the hills of South Africa’s fertile valley of Ceres, outside the house that Auntie Flora has called home for her entire adult life.
Sex planting is a way of pollinating crops by hand, which gives a much bigger bounty – case in point, Auntie Flora’s burgeoning squashes, which dwarf their naturally pollinated counterparts.
But bigger vegetables is just one small part of a much wider story – the story of how Auntie Flora, alongside a growing number of other South African female farm workers, are taking back control of the land they have worked their entire lives to feed their own communities rather than Europe’s hunger for cheap food.
Taking matters into their own hands
For nearly four decades, Auntie Flora has made her home in a quiet corner of one of South Africa’s sprawling commercial farms.
Like the others in the region, this farm exists not to feed local communities, but to supply Europe’s supermarket shelves. It’s a system predicated on precariously paid workers and propped up by pesticides so dangerous they are banned in Europe, yet are still manufactured and exported from there.
But the tide is slowly turning, thanks to the support of organisations such as the Women on Farms Project (WFP). As part of efforts to support and strengthen the capacity of women farm workers and dwellers to learn and exercise their rights, the Stellenbosch-based feminist NGO has been running training programmes for women to set up their own agroecological food gardens.
These food gardens were primarily established after WFP found that farmwomen, despite being the backbone of the country’s food production, often go hungry themselves. For instance, a 2019 study found that more than 80% of farm workers in the Northern Cape face seasonal hunger during April to August, which is the off-season period.
The project has since grown, with the women cultivating food gardens not only for themselves, but also to nourish their own communities, reclaiming both the land and the right to decide its future in the process.
Not only is the food produced both healthier and cheaper for the local community, but also offers the female farm workers – who, thanks to precarious working conditions and very little social protection are some of the most marginalised in South African society – a chance for empowerment, independence and security.
This is something especially important for women like Auntie Flora who, despite a lifetime of working and living on the farm, faces the prospect of eviction since the farm changed hands. The story is all too common for South Africa’s farm workers, whose housing rights are often linked to precarious work contracts offering little security.
Human hidden cost
But housing is far from the only issue faced by these farmworkers. Exploitation, low wages, precarious conditions, and exposure to pesticides banned in Europe are recurring themes I hear from many of the farmworkers I meet.
One of those fighting back is Auntie Ding. For more than two decades, Auntie Ding’s life has been bound to the vineyards of South Africa’s Western Cape, a region known as the De Doorns. She remembers working through the apartheid years, harvesting seeded grapes that “ripened naturally,” she explains.
But over the years, the vineyards changed. Buyers in Europe began demanding seedless varieties, dictating what farmers should plant.
With the new grape varieties came new cocktails of pesticides, many since banned in Europe, and often unlabelled or unidentifiable by the workers themselves. “They sprayed at night,” she said, recalling that workers were told to “stand, not sit” in the vineyards. None of the workers I met in South Africa reported ever being offered personal protective equipment, with many reporting that women take scarves to cover their faces in the fields.
It is farmworkers like Auntie Ding who bear the consequences of this. She explains that her doctor has made the links between the chemicals used on the vines and the miscarriages and ovarian cancer she has suffered.
For the fruits of her labour, her pay was only 69 rand (€3.39) a day — just 8 rand (€0.39) an hour. That was until 2012, when farm workers took a stand in the now famous farm worker uprising. Beginning in De Doorns, the protests quickly spread, culminating in farming communities across the Western Cape taking a stand to demand fairer working conditions and wages.
Farmworkers demanded 150 rand (€7.36) a day; today farmworkers earn 261 rand (€12.81), or around 29 rand (€1.42) an hour. Yet still today, there is very little in the way of pensions, compensation, or safety nets.
Auntie Ding wants consumers to understand the human cost hidden behind the “beautiful grapes going overseas”. “People don’t know how much we have to suffer for them to eat,” she tells me.
Now, refusing to expose herself to pesticides again, Auntie Ding has turned to her food garden as a way to make ends meet.
Thanks to being offered some investments into a small greenhouse and training, a reclaimed patch of scrubland behind her home has since been transformed to be able to help support both her family and her local community.
Learning and growing together
For others, the food garden journey has just begun. One of these is Auntie Stella, another farmworker I met during my time in South Africa. Her small patch of freshly cleared land may look bare for now, but she is excited by the promise of nourishment, resilience, and change that she hopes the soil will bring her.
Others, like Auntie Flora, already see the fruits of their labour – and she has no intention of stopping any time soon. “This is my home, and this is where I stay,” she says, refusing to be uprooted. Her dream is to one day be able to run a community market where she can sell her vegetables.
In a nearby valley in Stellenbosch, I’m introduced to Auntie Elizabeth and her husband who welcome me into their home. For them, tending the soil is as much about cultivating yourself as it is about cultivating crops. “Here, I also grow alongside my plants, we learn and grow together,” she says. “The garden brings me peace,” she says.
The food garden revolution that is stirring in South Africa is quiet, but it is rooted in dignity, agency, and transformation. In their gardens, these women are sowing more than seeds; they are sowing peace, power and the foundations for a better future.
*In South Africa, “auntie” is a term of respect and affection for any older woman, whether she is a blood relation or not, and is often a translation or equivalent of the Afrikaans word “tannie”. As such, I have chosen to refer to all the women in this piece in this way.
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