At 73, Norita Phiri is still quite the adventurous farmer. When others are sticking to only farming traditional crops like maize in her village in Zhombe Bhelamasvesve, she has decided to dabble in okra farming and is now producing the most aromatic and decadent coffee from okra seeds.

“I started experimenting with the okra seeds after I heard others talking about it. I realised that the coffee was quite good,” she said.

Coffee is the go to beverage for many people the world over. It brings warmth and comfort and is one of the highest selling beverage. According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO) the world consumption for coffee for 2020/21 is projected at 167.58 million bags. Norita hopes that if she gets access to better equipment she will be able to tap into this market and supply more of Zimbabwe’s coffee lovers.

“I started doing okra coffee in 2015. I sell it to my neighbors and other people in my community. What I need is enough equipment for grinding the okra seeds so as to produce the coffee on a larger scale,” Norita said.

Norita is a widow who has provided for her children out of farming. When her husband passed on they only had two cows. She had to sell one to cater for expenses during the course of her husband’s funeral, the other she lost during a drought season. What she went through when her husband passed on and she had to look after her family on her own drove her passion to learn more about conservation farming and experimenting with other crops.
An organisation called Self Help Development Foundation (SHDF) came to her village to teach people on best farming practices suitable for a drought ridden environments.
“Most people laughed at us when we started using boma sheets and not tilling our fields. They thought it was folly and would not amount to much in terms of harvesting. But I noticed that when we had a bad rainy season my field retained moisture because of the method we used of just having plant points where we put manure and our seeds,” she said.

The use of boma sheets in farming, is where farmers have moving cattle pens where cattle can graze in a particular field so that the cattle dung fertilises that particular field. After two weeks they move the pen to another person’s field and rotate until every person’s field is rich in manure. The introduction of grazing livestock to a field that once held crops is beneficial to the farmer and the field itself. Livestock manure can be used as a natural fertilizer for a farmer’s field. The added attention to her land also impacts on the quality of her okra.

A key feature of okra is that the entire plant is edible, which is an advantage from a food security standpoint. It’s low in calories and is full of nutrients. The vitamin C in okra helps support healthy immune function. It also has vitamin K, which helps one’s body to clot blood.