Snake Park local farm owners feel like they have failed to take full responsibility.

Daniel Mkhwanazi

The agricultural sector indeed has one too many work ethics and variety yet some of the residents of Snake Park had over the past years decided to start their farm fields just near the DRD Mine Dump, which is a great business opportunity for them to get by with maintaining their needs and desires. Still, they don’t see the dangers of how the Mine Dump Dust has negatively affected their business and caused terrific damage to the health of their animals, themselves, and their plantations.

We went on to engage with these local farmers and try to hear out what some of the impacts that have they experienced since they started having the land near the Mine Dump, Mr Nkosi a 64-year-old male who mainly works at his local farm that has pigs, cows, chickens. etc. has been farming for over 10 years yet he is reliable on his farm since he is a pensioner, he went on and said that farming had been one of the main things he had known very well since he grew up in the rural in KZN yet had always wanted to own himself a farm.

Later after he had retired from his work in 2016 he had that retirement fund that is when he started to seize the opportunity to start his farm he goes on to say that many people from agricultural business developments have come to him to help him grow his business but had failed him due to the Mine Dump Dust that affects his animals and crops. “I woke up one early morning to go check on my farm because I had to breed some cows and only to find that my poor cows had died and there was not any sign of harm on the skin, but i noticed a barrel of water where these animals drink water from had a Mine Dump Dust yet the water had toxins inside those water barrels, he assumed it was those toxins from the water barrels.. my heart was hurt due to this result” Mr Nkosi he said.

A 35-year-old Siyabonga who also works on the farms is a helper and looks out around at the designated farm. He went on and said he has been helping for about 4 years now yet there have been some challenges around the farm since it is nearly close to the Mine Dump. However, he has been having challenges with crops that usually do not intend to grow as expected since he is the one who regularly checks the crops, and seeds and waters them each after two days but some have particularly died due to the heavy storms and dusty weather that have hit their farm badly. 

Sometimes I ask myself how can we prevent these dusty conditions because after I have watered the plants, they become quickly dry and hence it’s like there was no water poured into these crops and seeds, although at times it gets wet due to heavy storms they get washed away or even worse they do not grow as expected, he said.

The main thing that should be looked at how badly is this scenario of these local farmers can be alleviated in the form of reaching out to agri forums or even agripreneurship skills that may boost their set of skills in having to not face such critical or either terrific experience by putting greenhouses for the plants and Jojo tanks to maybe try to water them with correctly. Since these farmers had been experiencing such disastrous conditions they should keep track of their health issues together with their animal’s conditions