Msonge Organic Family Farm

Spreading the word on organic farming

The Msonge Organic Family Farm is a success story in Zanzibar with more and more people signing up to receive doorstep deliveries of its just-picked, wild-grown fruit and veg. Its ambitions don’t stop there, with its founder, Dr Mwatima Juma, aiming to spur the entire island into embracing organic farming. Mark Edwards meets her.

Dr Mwatima Juma was instrumental in introducing the term organic farming in Tanzania. As chief of the Tanzanian head office of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the chairperson of the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement she helped put in place the standards the country’s farmers are required to meet to get their produce certified organic for the lucrative export market.

However, the organic movement only gave a name to sustainable farming practices that many Tanzanian farmers have been familiar with for generations.

Certainly, Dr Juma has been immersed in the wild way of farming since she can remember. She was raised on her father’s farm in Shakani on the Fumba Peninsula in the southwest of Zanzibar Island. It was an idyllic natural playground to grow up in, with the young Zuma free to roam its 15 acres, fashioning toys from the branches of trees and picking fresh mangos and bananas to snack on.

In time, though, she began to help her father, Abdulah Juma, and his team and her attention was drawn to the all-natural farming techniques they would employ such as using manure from the farm’s kept chicken and cows as fertiliser for new vegetable growth and rotating crops to preserve nutrients in the soil.

The farm is her father’s half of a 30-acre plot that he purchased together with his brother. The land was then spilt equally between the pair with Juma’s father – a nurse by trade – setting up a trust so that his children and extended family would share ownership of his farm in the years to come.

Family farm

While Juma’s uncle sold his share of the land to housing developers, her father intended for his farm and the nine-bedroom house built on site to remain as a source of food, income and a rural haven for Juma and her siblings away from the temptations of the city. However, another of his plans to ensure a brighter future for his children – entrenching the value of education – meant his academically primed offspring soon fled the nest for university courses and high-powered jobs on the mainland and abroad. “You sent us to school, now I like medicine,” was how Juma recalls her brother putting it to her crestfallen father.

Real results

Juma was alone among her brothers and sisters in maintaining links to her upbringing on the farm in her vertiginous career trajectory. She gained the first of her degrees in agriculture and was soon working with Tanzania’s Ministry of Agriculture as commissioner for research, finding out all she could about the growing organic movement in Europe and how her country could benefit from being a part of it.

Not everyone was sold on the idea and she faced plenty of opposition in arguing the case for organic farming. During all this time, she was regularly returning to Shakani and was seeing her words validated in real results on the farm.

Juma says: “People were telling me you can’t use organic methods to grow vegetables, but here we have fields of cassava, cooking bananas, sweet potatoes, spinach, radish, okra and cowpeas. I was walking that talk.”

Pakacha deliveries

At the start of 2020, the then 63-year-old began to shape a plan for her retirement once she stepped away from her official duties. Her father, who has now passed away, had always hoped that one day Juma would return to take over the family farm and with more time on her hands she foresaw an opportunity to “see what she can do here” and channel her considerable energies into making the farm – now to be called Msonge Organic Family Farm – flourish as a commercial enterprise as well as a centre of learning to spread the grow organic message across the Zanzibar archipelago.

The plan appeared doomed before it had barely begun. The covid pandemic struck and the ensuing international travel restrictions snatched away the farm’s prime customers – Zanzibar’s array of highspec hotels and restaurants – which, bereft of guests, no longer had any need for regular deliveries of fresh, organic produce for their menus.

However, Juma was able to pivot from the hospitality sector’s troubles by selling direct to consumers. Inspired by the ‘green basket’ organic food delivery schemes she had seen on work trips in Europe, she began her own. Juma and her small team filled up pakacha – a traditional Swahili basket woven from coconut palm leaves – with super-fresh produce from the farm and arranged twice-weekly deliveries (Monday and Thursday) straight to people’s homes on the island.

The project has taken off in a big way. At first the catchment area covered the Fumba Peninsula and the capital Zanzibar City, just 12km from Shakani, but deliveries have now reached resort villages on the southeast coast such as Paje and Jambiani. In time it is hoped operations will go island-wide.

Everybody wins with the project – the customers, the farm and the environment. The organic goodies that arrive on your doorstep will have been picked that morning so they are at the peak of perfection and taste wonderful. There’s plenty of variety too. Leave it up to the Msonge team to put your pakacha together and you’ll find a mix of wild fruits such as golden mangos, root vegetables like cassava and jack fruit, leafy greens such as rukola, spices such as freshly harvested cinnamon and “some little extra gifts”, as Juma puts it. All in all, there will be around 20 products in each pakacha. The abundance of the seasonal products means the prices can be kept low. It’s TSH 20,000 (US$ 8.50) for each delivery should you want to keep the pakacha – Juma tells me it makes a great laundry bin – or give the pakacha back to the farm and the price is TSH 15,000.

Arranging your order is easier than ever with the recent launch of the farm’s own app, which was developed by Juma’s tech-savvy son. Customer numbers continue to increase with the door-to-door delivery service a boon amid the social isolation of covid and the vitamin-rich produce a welcome boost for islanders’ immune systems put to the test by the virus.

Sustainable system

For Juma, the pakocha system means a guaranteed market for the wide range of produce she grows and support for the organic farm’s celebration of biodiversity. While Juma has arranged the 15 acres into distinct zones – among them designated areas for fruit orchards, vegetable fields and fodder crops for animal feed – they interrelate as sustainable ecosystems. This natural harmony can be as beautiful as it is productive at times, such as the natural beehives hung on the golden mango trees, which produce delicious organic honey and help to pollinate surrounding plants. Then there are the towering coconut palm trees that delineate the zones and provide shaded growing environments for other plants and breeding grounds for beneficial insect life.

By investing the consumer in this sustainable system – exemplified by the biodegradable pakocha which can be returned to the farm to become the waste to fuel more plant growth – Juma sees her organic farming going one step further into a permaculture way of life, reaping benefits for Zanzibar and its people for generations to come.

“Permaculture is wider, more holistic,” she explains. “It provides space to think long term. There should be a reason and a use for everything. Nothing is wasted on the farm. It trains you to design nature to work for you. Before you cut back a tree, think about what its shade brings and what you can grow under it.”

The thinking behind permaculture is shared to students at the Practical Permaculture Institute of Zanzibar, which the Msonge Organic Family Farm now runs. The international place of learning was set up in 2015 by the design team behind the Fumba Town housing development, which makes use of permaculture principles in its lush landscaping – among the features that have put its apartments and villas among the most desirable real estate on the island.

Teaching permaculture

Juma and Franko Goehse, from the Fumba Town team, became Facebook friends and soon Msonge Organic Family Farm was selling its fruit and veg to the earliest occupants of the town at regular farmers’ markets. When the idea for the institute was brought up, Juma mentioned that the farm had purchased a five-acre plot in Kizimbani, about 25 minutes’ drive north of Stone Town. Its homestead was converted into the institute and the farmland repurposed to provide practical demonstrations of the permaculture principles taught in the classrooms.

Juma admits to initial concerns that she may be “crazy” giving up the land to such an untested project, but it has, she says, proved “a blessing” with her own understanding of the possibilities of permaculture expanded from the input of students who have come from all over the world to study at the institute.

Msonge Organic Family Farm took over the running of the institute in March this year and while the majority of its classes are still conducted in English to students from across the globe, it has introduced a course in Kiswahili aimed at getting locals involved in wild growing.

Ultimately, Juma hopes that Zanzibar will become an organic island, future-proofing its world-famous growing conditions. “There’s a long way to go,” she admits. “Still, I hope I will see it in my living years.”

Stone Town is due an organic makeover, she says. “It has a surprising number of green spaces and small gardens that would really benefit from organic practices. I would also like to see waste recycling introduced there.”

Progress can certainly be seen at Msonge Organic Family Farm. The pakocha deliveries are going from strength to strength, hotels on the island are welcoming back tourists with Zanzi Resort, The Blue Bhari Hotel and Sunshine Marine

Lodge among those making orders once again and you’ll find a fresh selection of the farm’s produce at the Tupomoja Café in Mbweni every Sunday. There is also the opportunity for the public to taste Swahili dishes filled with fresh ingredients from the farm and cooked on the porch “of the same old big house” Juma grew up in at twice monthly Sunday ‘Farm to table’ lunches. You can expect traditional dishes such as makopa (dried and sliced cassava) and plenty of vegetarian options.

Looking ahead

With the extra acreage of the new farm in Kizimbani, Juma has been able to pursue a long-held desire to grow turmeric and cinnamon. These plants take a while to mature, but Juma is expecting a bumper crop in the coming years.

This means a lot of work. “There is so much to do. People are bending their backs to keep up,” says Juma. The scaled-up operations prompted Juma to employ five new staff in July, on top of her usual team of four workers and any children and grandchildren available to help out. However, the sexagenarian – who is up at 4.30am without fail and on pakocha delivery days she is helping with the harvest by 5am ahead of a full day of activities – sounds doubtful about the long-term prospects of the new arrivals, some of whom are already voicing concern at the physical labour involved.

Juma is used to the hard work. She was brought up on a farm – in the days when organic farming was just farming. She is hoping the wild ways of the past will become the future for Zanzibar with Msonge Organic Family Farm leading the way.

To find out more about the pakocha deliveries, ‘Food to Table’ Sunday lunches and visits to the Msonge Organic Family Farm, visit its Facebook site or call +255 754 536 630.

For more details on upcoming courses at the Practical Permaculture Institute of Zanzibar, visit permaculture-eastafrica.com

Pick of the pakocha

Dr Juma and her team always like to include a few welcome surprises among the justpicked fruit, vegetables and spices that turn up at your door. Here’s some of the more unusual.

Nyungu

A mixture of medicinal plants that are boiled together. Breathing in the steam from the process is thought to remedy a host of ailments from coronavirus to possession by evil spirits.

Rucola

A rocket-like leafy vegetable which has a distinctive peppery flavour and is great in salads, piled on top of pizza or made into pesto.

Cinnamon leaves

Cinnamon leaves are often dried and have a lighter taste and aroma compared to cinnamon bark when used in teas or cooking.

Matembele

These sweet potato leaves come with a wealth of health benefits. They are loaded with anti-oxidants, help protect eye health, can loosen congestion if you have a cold and strengthen your bones. It’s also pretty tasty with a spinach-like flavour.