Young Namibian blossoms

Post-settlement loan beneficiary Elize Eliphas (32) is a young female resettled commercial farmer in the Maltahöhe district near Mariental in the Hardap Region.Eliphas' farming journey started at the tender age of 14 with her parents at their homestead in northern Namibia and through assisting her sister who was a small-scale farmer in the Kavango East Region.After completing grade 12 with flying colours, she was advised to pursue medicine as a career, an idea she rejected and instead opted to enrol for an agriculture course at the Namibia University of Science and Technology.“People look at agriculture as a field for the poor academic performers and when I decided to study agriculture, many people wanted me to do medicine, which was not my preference. My passion is agriculture. All I knew in my life was agriculture and my first two years of study was paid with money from farming,” she says.Eliphas remained unemployed for six years after graduating and it was during this time that she came across a newspaper advertisement for farm resettlement. She applied and was resettled in 2015. Towards the end of the same year, she also received a Post Settlement Loan from Agribank to buy livestock, improve and maintain her resettled production unit. After two years of trial and error in farming, Eliphas approached the bank again to request for mentorship services.In July 2017, she was accepted on Agribank's mentorship programme and attached to Johannes Motinga in the Hardap Region.“I really appreciate Agribank's free mentorship programme. My mentor really opened my eyes to treat farming as business. He taught me different aspects of farming at a commercial level, ranging from record keeping, vaccinating programme, production plan, marketing, animal hygiene and farm diversification amongst others,” she says.One of the biggest challenges she faced as a farmer, was the 2019 drought. Another challenge was an outbreak of Orf disease among her goats last year, which resulted in more loses at her farm.Currently, Eliphas farms with cattle, goats, sheep, poultry as well as growing some crops.She has three employees and three agriculture students from NUST are on a six-month job attachment contract at her farm.“In the next five years, I picture myself being a successful commercial farmer from the resettled unit, and I want to be exemplary to other resettled farmers, who get resettled and become a burden to government by turning their farms into white elephants,” she says.She urges other young people to use their time wisely, by spending most of their time on constructive ideas such as engaging in farming. She further advises young Namibians who harbour ideas of farming to start small and seek support from role players in the sector such as Agribank.“My message to my fellow youth is: let's stop wasting our valuable time on unconstructive things such as drinking, complaining and gossiping. All these things will take us nowhere in life,” she says.

Young Namibian blossoms

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Republikein 2025-06-02

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Young Namibian blossoms

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