Artwell Chivinge talks to us about the youth and his relationship with nature.

An inspiring man by the name of Artwell Chivinge originally from Zimbabwe, shared with us his expansive knowledge of Home Food Security. Artwell speaks to us about youth involvement in agriculture and how growing up in rural Zimbabwe was his best teacher. Born to a family of rural farmers and brought up farming in a farming community, Artwell learnt the fine art of gardening organically as a very young child. He recollects his childhood with good memories of herding cattle and helping grow vegetables to make pocket money. He learnt how to harvest wild honey with his bare hands and observed from early on the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with nature. In his community all of their vegetable, fruit and grain needs were taken care of by the community, only leaving the odd trip to the shop for salt and soap. Artwell learnt how to process their food, growing their maize and taking it to the mill, his family was always blessed with good fresh nutritious food. He grew up seeing his parents farming and understood that to eat they must work. It started as a hobby like playing but now he knows how crucial his understanding food security is. Artwells family grew their own sunflowers and processed them into oil, they grew groundnuts and turned it into peanut butter, His family was poor in one way, and very rich in other ways. He feels that it is a blessing they did not have money to buy fertilizers and had to really seek out the answers to good relations with nature from nature. Through this Artwell developed a great passion and dedication to caring for mother Earth.

 Artwell has gone on to become a lecturer for UNISA in their two new ‘House Hold Food Security’ course. He promotes home food security through talks and tours at his own urban dwelling. He dreams for a piece of land to do further training courses from, where he can teach the public with practical skills how to farm with nature not against her. He found moving to the city meant limited land, but this didn’t mean he was going to fold his hands. He is going forward and promoting urban agriculture, agriculture in whatever space you have. He has revolutionized the quaint apartment building he shares with his family of four and other tenants. Within the limited spaces of flower beds and using his imagination to turn any used container into a mini veg garden he manages to save up to R1900 on spinach in one year alone! In one small space he manages to grow onions, herbs, and his favourite variety of Zimbabwean spinach. Any empty containers do, he recycles all old milk and juice containers and uses them as growing pots. He keeps earth worms in a brilliant system of old car tyres and makes compost from all the tenants organic matter. He would like to take it further and create a living roof, but is restricted. Artwell also works for the Eastern Cape NGO Coalition, and spent time teaching in Tanzania about home food security. He wants his pupils to know that instead of focusing on the macro picture they can contribute to their own home food security in their own micro environments.

He speaks to us about over coming the obstacles of Youth and agriculture.

 The children need to be encouraged from early childhood. In the crèche and primary schools, they need to start becoming involved in a garden set up. This should be factored in to their curriculum so they can develop an interest from an small child that feeds into their teens. That interest can develop into a passion and or a understanding of nature and her abundance when managed in the right way. They can feel like they can make a real contribution to sustainable agriculture and if done in the right way through environmental clubs can further their knowledge and outreach. The incorporations of story telling, poems, plays and music can play a key factor in creating an interest in nature, and Artwell encourages parents to become involved in their children’s knowledge gardening. He says his parents were such a big influence in his relationship with growing food, and if children see their parents gardening they become interested and feel free to ask questions. There are plenty of fields for which aspiring youth can move into in a professional level, and so agriculture should be seen as a positive step towards a sustainable future. He says as a child he learnt to love and appreciate all the gifts the wild gave him, like honey and herbs, and edible plants. Where you destroy nature you destroy the bio diversity and life giving soils and so youth need to be encouraged and shown the gifts of nature.