Growing on the Edge: How a Small Farm Builds Resilience
Slow, chosen steps towards resilience outlast sudden, rushed ones.
We got the first email a couple of weeks ago. Our wholesaler — who supplies staples we don’t grow ourselves — warned of shortages, price increases and uncertainty. The Strait of Hormuz crisis, which has effectively halted about 20% of the world’s daily oil supply, is rippling outward, and I’m sure you have your own stories of how it’s reaching you.
Five disruptions in a decade of farming
There have been at least five major disruptions in the decade-plus we’ve been farming, and there will be more:
Day Zero, 2018. Cape Town’s water crisis hit irrigation-dependent farms hard. Our greywater systems, mulching, soil-moisture retention and composting toilets all helped. We kept growing — and kept improving our water systems for the next drought.
COVID-19, 2020. Supply chains struggled with sudden lockdowns. Our food cooperative bought direct, with a much shorter supply chain, and our customers were local. The disruption pushed us to grow more staples — cabbage, carrots, beetroot, potatoes, sweet potatoes — and to teach others to do the same.
Ukraine War, 2022. Global fertilizer prices rose over 200% and feed costs spiked. This was the motivation for our Black Soldier Fly operation, turning organic waste into larvae to feed our chickens. We’ve never used inorganic fertiliser, so we kept composting and feeding our soil normally — zero synthetic-input dependency.
Loadshedding, 2022–2024. Cold-chain failures stressed businesses across the city. We didn’t have a cold chain, and our production didn’t require refrigeration.
Hormuz, 2026. Now.
Why small, diversified systems absorb shocks
This emergency is alarming, and we don’t have all the solutions — we feel these disruptions like everyone else, and there are still plenty of fragile parts to our system. But small, complex and diversified systems are more resilient in an emergency. I don’t mean we can control the uncontrollable, only that we can stay calm and keep moving forward.
If your household can be embedded in community, with dozens of systems feeding into each other, it absorbs shocks differently — because it assumes there will be disruptions. This is something we tried to say at the SAHRC hearings: disruptions are not going to become less frequent. They are likely to become more common.
Build your safety net before the emergency
The hard truth is that it’s stressful to build a safety net in the middle of an emergency — and even harder to think beyond your own household when you’re struggling yourself. Household resilience really involves slowing down, taking stock, and reflecting on what it takes to live: how to compost waste, how to have consistent access to water, energy and food.
That planning can be slow and layered, and it’s okay to start gently now and get better every year. A few extra packets of seed, sown over many years, compound into a whole new skill set born of experience. Whatever happens with this emergency, there will be more — and there will always be people in our community who face personal emergencies too.
Wouldn’t it be worth collectively building resilient food systems that focus on people rather than endless economic growth? That’s the same instinct behind growing for subsistence first, and behind planting perennial food forests and fruit trees that outlast any single season.
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