Privately owned Zambezi Ranching and Cropping is Zambia’s largest mixed farming operation. South Africa Magazine talks to Managing Director Graham Rae.

By Ian Armitage

Graham Rae is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing.

He knows farming. It is what he does.

Rae, a hugely successful commercial farmer, used to do it in Zimbabwe, a country he was born, grew up in and loved.

Today he struggles to think of going back to the place where his grandparents were born in 1910.

Rae, who now lives in neighbouring Zambia, is one of several hundred white farmers who fled Zimbabwe because of President Robert Mugabe’s campaign to redistribute white-owned farms to landless blacks.

He said militants from Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party tried to kill him before he left in 2001.

“[It] was all down to survival,” Rae says of his decision to leave.

The Zimbabwean government launched a programme of land seizures in 2000, stripping white farmers of their property, a move that was almost wholly responsible for the near total collapse of a once thriving commercial agriculture sector, says Rae.

He used to own a 1,100 hectare farm in Shamva, Zimbabwe, which boasted the largest private dam in Zimbabwe that also serviced 56 other black and white farmers in the area.

With his wife Bernadine and three children, he left after numerous threats and a tip-off that he could be killed.

Now, they live happily on Penyaonse Farm, perched on a hilltop, 45 km northeast of Zambia’s capital Lusaka.

“Listen, it has been very much Zambia’s gain this whole thing,” Rae says.
“Zambia has prospered and yes I would say that Zimbabwean farmers like me have played a role, but so too have farmers from elsewhere, like South Africa.

“I think what has happened in terms of Zambia’s growth can be attributed to the strong leadership that has been shown in this country,” he adds.

Rae says at his farm they have increased crop production considerably and created many new jobs; farmers like him have also introduced new farming methods and improved soils to enhance yields, while supporting families through outreach programmes and opening a medical clinic.

Zambezi Ranching and Cropping, a huge farming network, has medical clinic for workers and communities nearby, he says.

“When we first moved to Zambia, only 100 hectares of Zambezi Ranching & Cropping Ltd was cultivated but we’ve changed that, putting in hectares of white maize, seed maize, wheat, soya beans and tobacco,” explains Rae. “We are now cropping 4,000 hectares with room for expansion.

“Tobacco production has increased massively in Zambia since I arrived; there are 2,500 workers compared to 150, and the number of beef cows has grown to almost 11,000,” he adds.

"Since our arrival, tobacco output has increased significantly and more jobs have been created. There were approximately 1,000 to 1,200 breeding cows and around 17,000 hectares of land when we got here; we’ve now expanded the land holding up to 33,000 hectares. We put up silos; we have expanded our cattle herd to around 11,000 head; we are doing chickens – we do 210,000 chickens every six weeks - and we’ve put in 1,500 hectares of irrigation. We have revamped all the buildings, staff housing, built new houses, and built new storage facilities, so we’ve done a hell of a lot.

“These days we are cropping huge amounts per annum and selling a lot of livestock.”

It is a fantastic growth story.

During the 2010/11 season, Zambezi Ranching and Cropping supplied 2,225 head of cattle of Zambeef, Zambia’s biggest agricultural firm with a revenue of K770.5 billion.

He thanks Carl Irwin, Francis Grogan and Adam Fleming, for their part.

“It has been a great journey and obviously we are hungry for more.”

Rae takes pride in being part of Zambia’s agriculture sector and owns a stake and management rights in Zambezi Ranching and Cropping.

So what next for him, the firm and the ZRC Farms? Well, Rae, for one, plans to cut tobacco output, because of high production costs.

Tobacco output in Zambia reached 40 million kg in 2010. Farmers are also growing maize and other cash crops.

“The tobacco industry certainly faces challenges and has peaks and troughs,” Rae says. “Tobacco is increasingly costly to produce. Price increases often cause consumers to stop smoking all together. If volumes fall in countries where tobacco sales are the highest, this could spell doom for the industry. For that reason we have to start thinking about diversifying and at the moment we are looking at potatoes, onions and canned tomatoes.”

Growing potatoes could be an answer, he stresses.

“I’ve got a colleague who runs a potato distribution business and he is forecasting a 20 percent growth per annum on potatoes,” Rae says. “They [the distribution company] are utilising about 1,600 to 2,000 tons of potatoes a month; of that Zambia is producing about 800 tons. So there is a huge gap for expansion.

“On onions, most of the onions are imported out of the Eastern Cape and there is a market there, if we can learn to grow the right varieties and store them properly. There is also opportunity for supplying both crops into the Democratic RepuC. Potatoes have been flown / air freighted into the DRC.”

A new an exciting development is that of canning tomatoes.

“That is an initiative with the global conglomerate Glencore. They have come here and are looking at putting some canning plants in. We are in trials at the moment,” Rae says.

“If you look at potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco, they all come from the same family, so you can’t grow them together because of the common diseases,” he cautions.

Regardless, these are optimistic times.

“Cropping is an exciting part of our business, with lots of opportunities,” Rae continues. “We’ve probably another 800 hectares of irrigation development that we can do, while we are always looking to improve our methods and invest in technology. We look too at maintaining our eco-systems and environment. That is vital. Anything we see as environmentally non-friendly we have to look at moving away from it; we are looking at pesticides, to give you an example, and fertilisers.”

Rae also wants improvements on the ranching side of the business and an increase to carrying capacity. “When you look at Brazil, it has the world's largest commercial livestock herd. Zambia has a way to go!”

A concern he has is that the farming population is getting older and older.

“At the last Zambian National Farming Union annual conference, the president raised this issue with the president of the country and said that farmers were getting older and older and something had to happen to make it more attractive for young Zambians to go into farming. Most of the younger generation drift off into the towns and cities for the bright lights,” Rae says.

Zambia remains one of the most politically stable countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Africa as a whole. There has been democracy since 1991 and the country is likely to boom for many years to come.

Image: supplied