Historically, farming and good health were on a continuum for the Xhosa people of South Africa. Over time, however, the food and farming systems in the Eastern Cape province have been deeply scarred by the ongoing legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Busisiwe Mgangxela and Xolelwa Koncoshe – agroecological farmers and Xhosa community leaders who earlier trained and worked as nurses – share some insights in this dialogue.
Health and agriculture: a false divide
‘Sis Busi’ and ‘Sis Xolie’ consider themselves ‘activists for living soil’. For both of them, the connections between human wellbeing and regenerative farming practices are clear. They are drawn to agroecological farming as a means of addressing the health challenges that result from the depletion and contamination of soil from colonial farming practices. They are also resisting the introduction of genetically modified seeds and encouraging a return to indigenous crops. Today, the women are starting to gain visibility in their province for their opposition to contemporary governance approaches that regard health and agriculture as two separate issues.
“My mother was a farmer while working as a nurse. Health and agriculture, hospitals, medicine, nurses and farmers – they should all be in one pot with agroecology,” says Sis Busi firmly. “A lot of people who have been nurses are in agriculture now, even if it’s not always agroecological farming. Farming resonates with caring: if you’re caring for bodies you’re also going to be drawn to caring for soils. Also, the five-step nursing practice I learned as a student – assess, analyse needs, make a plan, implement it, record what you did and evaluate it – I still use this process. It helps you fit in anywhere, including when you stop nursing and start farming.”
“Mmm, yes, the things we learnt in nursing training, they’ve sometimes been a useful basis,” agrees Sis Xolie. “I remember being taught that eating healthily is a form of medicine. But I also recall that insights into food production didn’t feature in our training. While they taught us about the importance of eating a nutritious and varied diet, the curriculum was silent about how the quality of the soil and water and the quality of food are connected.”
“The curriculum was silent about how the quality of the soil and water and the quality of food are connected” - Sis Xolie
She reflects deeper on this insight. “In the training programme of the Department of Health, nurses learn biology and anatomy, head to toe, which leads us to nutrition. They’ll make sure you understand things like: for these bones to grow, you have to have the right nutrition, carbs, minerals, fats. That’s how health and nutrition were looked at: just, what are you eating, don’t eat too much of this or that.”
Sis Busi laughs and shakes her head. “There was nothing about how the food was grown, about fungi, protozoa, soil health – this I only learned when I started learning agroecology. Eating ‘all the colours on the plate’ was taught, but I never learned about healthy soil and how that’s the most important thing for food. Agroecological farming looks at healthy food, strong seeds that farmers own, and clean soil. I only understood that connection when I learned agroecology, when I learned what stands between eating healthy food, real food, and eating paper!”
She elaborates further on this point. “There was a professor who told me: tell people you are farming the soil – it’s the soil that offers the nutrients. If you put poisons into the soil, you’re eating poisons in the food even if the vegetables have all the elements we were taught about in nutrition classes. And in my work on curriculum development, and as a trainer of trainers, I’m changing what young nurses and farmers are learning, making sure they even learn about more than just soil. I focus a lot on rainwater because it goes along with agroecology – ways to save water and all the rain-harvesting techniques that go hand-in-hand with food growing. Nurses are also involved with understanding water: not only learning that our bodies are made of water, but that we need clean water for good hygiene and rainwater for good food.”
Sis Xolie agrees. “Agriculture and nursing are not far from each other, and I think the Departments of Agriculture and Health should be doing the same thing. If we invested in healthy soils for healthy food we wouldn’t have to spend so much on sickness, elder health care, Alzheimer’s, cancers – all the diseases that we’re seeing now, and all the side effects of medication that aren’t explained when they put people into a treatment protocol. I want the Department of Health to emphasise agroecology everywhere!”
Indigenous farming practices
Their shared professional background in nursing is one reason why Sis Busi and Sis Xolie are such good friends. They also support one another in teaching other food producers about “going back to the old ways of farming,” as Sis Xolie puts it. Their conversation meanders back to agroecology as a way to honour the good practices of the past.
“We need to remember those old ways,” agrees Sis Busi. “We’ve found a lot of women who need to know more about agroecology. They plant, they produce vegetables, but they need training about agroecology principles. And they are very excited to learn that.”
Only when they were exposed to agroecology as an approach to heal soils and bodies did they fully remember the farming practices of their grandparents
Like agroecology, traditional Xhosa farming has social values of care at its core. Sis Busi elaborates: “It’s the same with the way we work with women now: we suggest that they do ‘ilima’, which is coming together, doing one garden together, all at one time. And then they go to the next garden, helping each other. And that’s exciting! On the day of ilima we’ll cook together, the traditional ‘imifimo’. We’ll eat indigenous food like our grandparents used to.”
“We call that ‘Ubuntu’, where you help each other,” Xolie adds. “The young people join in too. The most important thing about the work we do in Ncera is the effect it has on those who are part of it. We have young people who are supporting the initiatives even without being paid; this is something remarkable because they are giving back to the community.”
Health and self-sufficiency
Agroecological principles can also apply to new ideas, says Sis Xolie. “Like tower gardens for Elders. When they feel like they can’t bend over to garden any more, I show elderly ladies, who are often taking loads of pills, how they can still grow food in elevated boxes in soils rich with organic matter, how they can produce healthy food. And how eating this food will improve their health, also their mental health because they’ll feel themselves contributing to their own wellbeing.”
For these elderly women, the benefits also extend to increased self-sufficiency. “They are all looking forward to trying new things,” explains Sis Xolie. “Some of them are a bit nervous, but we know that with change there’s always that bit of hesitation. But I’m confident we’ll get there because they like the idea of working their land – not only to eat from it but to generate some income so that they can supplement their social grant money.”
Healing soils, healing bodies
Both women say that it was only after they embarked on their farming journeys, and really only when they were exposed to agroecology as an approach for people who want to heal soils and bodies, that they fully remembered – and by this they mean spiritually and practically reconnected with – the farming practices of their grandparents. This was when they came full circle in their understanding of the interconnections between the health of humans and the health of the earth.
Today, Busi on her farm, and Xolie through the community centre she runs, see their work as helping others to fully remember the clean, adaptive farming approaches that are the birthright of the Xhosa people.
Author: Vanessa Farr, who guided and wrote up this dialogue, is a regenerative storyteller with the women-led Mycelium Media Colab, which works to bring about positive societal change by collaboratively producing and amplifying creative socio-environmental content. She practices agroecology in her own backyard. Contact: vee@vfarr.org.
A note about our methodology: The beginnings of this conversation about nutrition and agroecology took place during an inter-provincial learning exchange between Adaptation Network members and storytellers from the Mycelium Media Colab in November 2024. Once we had all returned home, we workshopped the conversation more fully through WhatsApp exchanges, which are transcribed and narratively organised in this piece. Videos of Sis Busi and Sis Xolie can be viewed on the Adaptation Network website and on this YouTube playlist.
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This article is part of Issue 2-2025: Cultivating health and healing
