Member - Mpeni Farm Limited

Mpeni Farm Limited is a family owned business sitting on a 15 acre piece of land. We are into integrated farming. Our main products are bananas, fresh tilapia bream fish and dairy. We also have beef cattle, goat, assorted poultry and assorted fruits and vegetables. We currently have nine (9) fish ponds with an average size of 35m X 45m (capacity of 60 tons of fish per year), a 7 acre banana plantation (capacity of 70 tons of bananas per year), 7 dairy cattle (capacity of 55000 liters of milk per year) and 30 beef cattle. We are also into value addition, from the fish that we produce we make smoked fish, dry fish, fish sausages, fish soup powder and fish samosas. The farm currently has a 5kva solar plant that is used to power the pumps that supply water for the fish ponds and the banana plantation. We have recently acquired a 10kva solar system which once installed, will be able to power the production plant and cold storage facilities. We also have a bio-digestor that produces bio-gas which we use for our heating. The byproduct of the bio-gas is bio-slurry which we use in our banana and vegetables. Adding bio-slurry instead of chemical fertilizers make our products organic and also reduces our cost of production. The installation of the solar plants has also reduced our cost of production and has also allowed use to be able to run efficiently as we could not run all the time when we were using the power grid as power supply was erratic. We are in the process of constructing more fish ponds to increase our production to ensure that we have fish all year round and also increasing our banana plantation which will increase our production by 50% by February 2022. We also want to increase the number of dairy cattle to 40 by December 2021.