Leaving Joburg hatches profitable poultry business for rural farmer

Poultry farmer Zinzi Manana looks back with pride when she ponders on her family's decision to abandon the hubbub of Johannesburg for an improved quality of life in Pongola, northern KwaZulu-Natal.

While she was born in the rural KZN town, Manana grew up in Johannesburg. In 2012, Manana she decided to quit her job as a branch secretary at a recruitment agency in the City of Gold, in favour of the rural bliss Pongola offers. 

The family’s first foray into big-scale agriculture was a vegetable farm on their 14-hectare land. However, a devastating drought in 2015 forced Manana to abandon the project. 

“We were still trying to figure out what exactly we wanted to do. When we started we did vegetable production, but in 2015 there was drought and we couldn’t continue with that,” she said.

Undeterred, the family spotted a gap in the poultry space and decided to give it a try. 

“At the time there was a demand for fresh broilers because people in our area only depended on [a major] commercial producer. A lot of people didn’t like their [chicken] meat as they wanted fresh broilers.

“Being a first generation farmer has been a very difficult journey. We didn’t have any finance, we started with nothing.”

Her journey was less stressful after receiving 200 day-old chicks and feed from a KwaZulu-Natal premier’s office programme.

“We then just gave it a try. We researched what happens after you’ve grown the broilers and saw a gap in the market,” she said.

“From there we received funding from the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) twice.”

When the poultry business started in 2016, Manana and her family constructed six broiler houses each with a capacity for 200 chicks.

In 2018 and 2019, her poultry business, Sir Rooster Farms, received funding from the NYDA. The money  went straight to the purchasing of much-needed equipment.   

The business, which has eight permanent staff, mainly supplies its produce to Pick n Pay. However, it also supplies local B&Bs, lodges and shisanyama outlets.

While the business currently produces 2,000 broilers per week, plans are afoot to ramp up this figure to 6,000. 

In 2023, Manana’s effort bore fruit when her business became one of the 45 recognised operations during the KZN department of agriculture, land reform and rural development’s Women in Agriculture Annual Recognition Awards in the smallholder farmer category.

– This article was first published in the GCIS’s Vuk’uzenzele