Diversifying the farm income, Farming Botswana.

Diversifying the farm income

Making money while farming can have its own challenges, for example imagine if you are a cabbage farmer and a hail storm destroys your crops a month before harvest! How will you pay the bills? And so if you look at successful farmers you will find that they diversify in other words they don't put all their eggs in one basket. So as a farmer you must ask yourself, if my main crop fails will I still be able to pull through. Will I be able to pay the bills?

How to Diversify?

Well lets say you are Cabbage farmer, every month you plant out 2000 cabbages, this is your main source of income, in addition you decide to plant 5000 heads of Garlic, since garlic will take around 90 days or more to harvest and in Botswana you will only be able to get one set in, in a year. Hence your 5000 garlic is just a low maintenance back up. Of course you will still want to diversify even more. Can you get a few Pigs? or maybe some Chickens? At the same time you need to remember that as a farmer you only have so much time and most of your time will be spent on farming your cabbages, so look for things that your farm can do or produce that's not time consuming that will supplement the farm income.

One way many farmers in South Africa do this is by setting up guest accommodations on their farms, I highly recommend that every farmer attempts to do this, it does not have to be fancy accommodation It just has to be clean. Even if you built a traditional mud hut put a nice clean bed in it and built a simple outdoor shower and toilet you can earn an additional income. You may wonder how to market such an investment, well you have to use technology. One of the most common ways of marketing a small guest room or campsite these days is to use an online App called Airbnb you can signup for it here for free: Sign up here, to host your guest room or campsite on Airbnb many people use this app when traveling these days because its affordable and there are many benefit's and perks that come with using it.  Of course if you just want to use the Airbnb app For traveling You Can sign up here,  if you do use my link you will get almost five hundred pula travel credit on your new account, that you can use when you book your next trip. I personally use this app and I absolutely love it.

In todays world as farmers we must diversify in order to be successful farmers, remember you not just a farmer! you are also a business man/woman.

Here are some other ideas.

Farm Watermelons 
Farm Sheep
Make money online in Botswana
Grow Carrots
Grow Cabbages
Grow Green Peppers
Grow Swiss Chard
Farm Garlic

as always thanks for reading please follow share with your friends or leave a comment, or question.

Why grow Swiss Chard or Spinach in Botswana

Why grow Swiss Chard or Spinach in Botswana?

We often call it Spinach however the correct name is Swiss Chard this vegetable is a really great addition to any small farm and there are three good reasons 

1. Swiss Chard is very uncomplicated to grow and really does not need much attention, if you plant and water it, it will grow.

2. It is profitable, and the reason for this is not that the profit margin is high but rather that you can sell it every week, the market hardly gets flooded as Swiss Chard has a very short shelf life. this means that if you are supplying street vendors or even large main stream shops  they will need fresh produce every week.

3.Farm space. Unlike Tomato's or Cabbages, Swiss Chard does not need a lot of space. If you plant 10 sq. meters of Swiss Chard you will find your self harvesting without much problem 30 plus bundles of Swiss Chard per week.

So to sum it up basically, Swiss Chard is what helps you as the farmer pay the day to day bills while you wait for your main crops to mature eg. Cabbages or Green Peppers. Also any extra old stock could be fed to your pigs or Sheep!

So how do you grow Swiss Chard? Well I wrote about that in 2016 so here is a link to that: How to Grow Swiss Chard?

Sheep Farming Botswana, Part One

Sheep farming Botswana, Part one

It was my brother, who the other day started talking about farming sheep, and it got me thinking....would it be worth it or viable to farm sheep in Botswana and what would be involved? When it comes to starting any enterprise the first thing that one needs to do is research. Research allows you to count the cost of an enterprise before you spend anything at all, it is of little use to start a an enterprise before counting the cost!

Counting the cost

1. Find out your Max Gross income. What does this mean? Basically you want to know how much is the max income your sheep will bring in, in one year or season before expenses. To find this answer I had to do some research, first I wanted to know how much could be got for one sheep, for this I went to Facebook and searched all the adverts of people buying and selling sheep in Ngamiland. I soon discovered that a common figure for a sheep was Bwp 1000.00 which was much higher then I imaged. The next bit of research that I did was to find out, how many lambs could a farmer expect to get from ten ewes in one year? Again I went for the max figure, that is saying that each ewe gives birth to twins and that there are no losses. This then leads us to conclude that ten ewes would give us 20 lambs that in 6 too 8 months would be sold for Bwp 1000.00 each, giving us the grand total of Bwp 20000.00.

Now this is a seriously inaccurate figure for the simple reason that its not realistic, lambs will die, you wont always get Bwp 1000.00 per sheep, not every ewe will have twins. However this is our  EMGI (Estimated Max Gross Income) this figure is important because now we know that, if we want too farm ten sheep and max 20 lambs, the seasons expenses  have to be way less then Bwp 20000.00 to make it profitable 

So how much does it cost to keep ten sheep and at max 20 lambs for one season? we will look into that in our next post, so please subscribe and if you have any thoughts or feelings drop us a comment!  

How to Make Money Online in Botswana

Make money online South Africa and Botswana

Making money Online in South Africa and Botswana can be very difficult since most online money making sites are limited to the UK or USA, so i set out to discover the Top Sites to earn Money online in Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and even Zambia.

The first site I discovered is called PaidViewpoint , on this site you get paid to take survays, basically by answering questions you help them with market research and although when you first start you don't earn much per survay the more survays you complete the higher ratings you receive and thus the more money you make per survay, my first survay earnt me $00.88 and only took like five minutes.
You can sign up for PaidViewpoint Here

How to make money in Botswana

How to make money in Botswana

Botswana being a young and fast growing country has many opportunity's to make money both off an online! In order to identify opportunity's one should first take a look at small businesses in other countries that are doing well and see if it is possible to bring those idea's to botswana. For example in south Africa there are shark cage diving allowing people to dive with great white sharks, in Zambia and Zimbabwe they have crocodile cage diving....but Botswana still is yet to offer such an experience, now i am not saying you should start a crocodile diving safari in Botswana but rather this is but an example of how to look for opportunity's in Botswana.


With more and more people using facebook in Botswana the online world also offers opportunity's to make money in Botswana online. For example many are using Facebook groups to buy and sell new and second hand goods, one could buy electronic goods online from china and sell them on Botswana Facebook groups, or offer to sell other people's cars for a commission online also on Facebook groups, the same can be done with property, or even services.
You can also earn money by taking online survays you can read more about how you can do that at
How to make Money Online in Botswana

One of my personal favorite ways to make money in Botswana is farming, there are many opportunity's for the hard working farmer in Botswana, since most of Botswana's vegetables come from South Africa at high cost, farming vegetables in Botswana is an excellent way to make money in Botswana, you can read more about vegetable farming in Botswana HERE
Earn money by cabbage farming
Chicken farming is also a good way to make money in Botswana both for meat and for eggs, also raising pigs for pork are all good opportunity's to make money in Botswana.


Another popular way to earn more money in Botswana is tourism, if you have some land even if it is in the middle of nowhere perhaps you could think of opening a camp site, when one travels to places like Namibia one is surprised to see so many campsites but in Botswana there are only few and only in the tourism areas. Talking about Namibia in Namibia one see so many coffee shops and bakery's but apart from in Maun, in Botswana we don't find many coffee shops and cafés, so they offer another opportunity to make money in Botswana!

As always thank you for reading and if you enjoyed please follow and share!

Why do tomato plant leaves curl? Vegetable farming Botswana

Why do leaves curl on tomato plants?

Tomato leaf curl can be caused by a variety of things, in Botswana red spider mite are often the problem, if you look at the under side of the leaf you will be able to see tiny red mites and often also see lots of spider webs too. Red spider mites often arrive on your farm by means of chicken manure, you can read more on that: Here

If you don’t see bugs on the underside of the leaves, it’could be that you have a fungus problem. You can tell if it’s a fungal problem by looking at the entire plant, especially the leaves. If the leaves are lighter in color than they should be for your variety of tomato, you probably have a viral or fungal infection. The same holds true if you have spotting on the leaves. New article on fungus coming soon will link it here,

Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed please follow and share!

Watermelon farming, vegetable farming Botswana

When you think about growing watermelons in a hot climate like Botswana, your first thought will probably be "this is not going to work!" however when you research the origins of watermelons many a scientist will point out that watermelons come from the dry kalahari Desert! Even to this day one is still able to find many types of wild watermelons growing in the wilderness of Botswana.
Hence it should be no surprise that watermelons are a great crop to cultivate in Botswana and in most parts of south Africa,

Watermelons need a few things to grow

1. Watermelons need water, as there name suggests, you can't get a good sweet watermelon without proper watering, however that said, the rainy season in Botswana often provides plenty of water to grow beautiful sweet watermelons,

2. To grow good quality watermelons you need good quality soil, so add lots of cow manure and compost to your watermelon field you could also add some chicken manure but first read about the dangers of using chicken manure Here

3. Watermelons need warm weather, so the best time to plant them is late August to early September, remember that November and December there are plenty of watermelons on the market so to try and get into the market early, you need to plant as early as possible!

As always thanks for reading! If you found this information useful please share it with your friends on Facebook or wherever you want!! Or just follow this blog!