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Urban Oasis, a six-part video series, looks at community food gardening projects that employ, up-skill and feed local residents. The series explores themes of sustainability, self-reliance, food security, community-building and environmental impact.
- A food garden in Ocean View feeds the community and keeps kids away from crime.
- Five founding female farmers delivered vegetable boxes and bread during the pandemic-induced lockdown.
- Ocean View Organics now aims to become a training hub for agricultural studies.
A sprawling food garden alongside Ocean View Secondary School, built up by five female farmers, provides food and agricultural skills training for the community, steering the hungry away from petty crime.
An urban farming training programme, started by Justin Bonello – South Africa's celebrity chef of Cooked and The Ultimate Braai Master fame – empowered a team of Ocean View locals to create their own food garden. Evolving from Bonello's Neighbourhood Farm organisation, which, at the time, already had a presence in the South Peninsula of Cape Town, the programme enlisted 21 interns.
"We got accepted into the programme. None of us knew about farming," says Nicky Jacobs, farm manager at Ocean View Organics, who was part of the original cohort of interns hand-picked by Bonello.
Two months of "intensive training" reduced the cohort to just 10 remaining participants, five men and five women, who completed the year-long programme.
Jacobs said:
This rugged determination paid off, and the farm was gifted to the community of Ocean View. Again, the cohort, who completed the training and were left in charge of the farm, was halved, with only five female farmers remaining.
The five are known as the "kos [food] gangsters".
"I'm going to be honest, there was no salary [but] the females thought, 'no man, we started this, we can't give up'. So, in 2020, we started a cooperative, the five female farmers, and we called ourselves OV [Ocean View] Organics," explains Jacobs.
This coincided with South Africa being plunged into lockdown, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, severely worsening socioeconomic conditions and exposing the issue of food insecurity among the country's poorest communities.
For all its horrors, the pandemic provided OV Organics with "a boost", says Jacobs.
The farm started producing and delivering vegetable boxes to households in Ocean View. They also founded a bakery, with thousands of loaves reaching those in need. Some of the farm's produce has also been donated to Open Door, a community development and social work project, and distributed, as part of meals, to the poorest residents of Ocean View.
"We try to tackle every soup kitchen, so that everybody can be fed in Ocean View," says Jacobs.
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"Our plan is to make this a training hub as well, for agriculture to be studied at the high school," says Jacobs.
"We really like people to be educated [about] eating from the earth and protecting your soil. If you take care of the soil, the soil will give you food to eat."
