Heritage Day: Building a legacy through agriculture with Samkelisiwe Sithole
Heritage Day in South Africa is usually spent looking back at where families come from, what they have carried forward, what a name or a dish or a piece of land means. Samkelisiwe Sithole holds that same idea, but she builds it rather than only remembering it.
Celebrated annually on 24 September, Heritage Day is a public holiday set aside to celebrate the diversity of South Africans, their cultures, languages, and beliefs as a "rainbow
nation."
For Sithole, this day means remembering where the nation comes from while also thinking about building the generation that is yet to come. "For me, agriculture is deeply connected to heritage. Food, land, farming and community have always played an important role in how families sustain themselves and pass knowledge from one generation to another," she says.
For Sithole, this connection is not abstract. It is the business she runs.
A name built from love
Sithole is the founder and managing director of Luhnyezi Farms, a woman- and youth-owned agribusiness in a rural part of KwaZulu-Natal. The name itself is a small act of heritage-making. It comes from her own children, combining Luthando, meaning love, and Nkanyezi, meaning shining star. She built the business name around them because, in her words, they are "a constant reminder of why I started this journey and of the legacy I hope to leave behind."
That is how she defines heritage more broadly too. "Heritage is not only about what we inherit from previous generations, but also about what we intentionally build and pass on to the next generation," she says. Luhnyezi represents love, hope, possibility, and the belief that her children should inherit something meaningful from the work she does today.
From farm to agro-processor
Sithole started Luhnyezi Farms in 2021 with a vision that went beyond traditional farming. She wanted an enterprise that could sit across the agricultural value chain, create jobs, develop other entrepreneurs, and add to South Africa's agro-processing base.
The business began in poultry farming and has since moved into value-added egg processing, developing products such as liquid whole egg, egg whites and egg powder for bakeries, food manufacturers, hospitality businesses, retailers, and institutional and international markets.
She is also exploring ways to turn poultry and other agricultural waste into usable products rather than sending it to landfill, and through the Luhnyezi Training Academy she shares practical poultry knowledge with aspiring farmers.
A test, and what got her through it
"I have experienced production losses, financial challenges and the realities of trying to build an agricultural manufacturing business with limited resources," Sithole says. The clearest test came when Luhnyezi Farms lost its layer chickens, the birds that had underpinned its egg business from the start. Losing them put the continuity of the whole operation at risk, and threatened to undo years of work built on very little.
It was at that point that her incubation with Oribi mattered most directly. As Oribi's 2025 Cohort grantee and alumna, Sithole was able to redirect the business toward broiler production, giving Luhnyezi Farms an alternative source of revenue while the egg side recovered.
Rather than closing the business or waiting for conditions to improve, she adapted, and that response, more than the support itself, is the story she tells about her own resilience. The same instinct carried into how she treats her own knowledge.
Through Oribi's 2025 Cohort project training, coaching and mentorship for other emerging entrepreneurs, she has passed on the same practical understanding of agriculture and business that carried Luhnyezi Farms through its hardest stretch, extending the benefit of her own recovery to other people building similar businesses in comparable conditions.
From participant to contributor
Beyond that grant support, Oribi's role in Sithole's journey has largely been to build capacity rather than hand out capital: mentorship, coaching, e-learning and a network of business experts and fellow innovators, working through what the incubator calls its Trust Model, helping entrepreneurs trust themselves, trust their solutions and trust their communities.
That relationship has since evolved. Sithole now also supports the implementation of Oribi's new REACH CSOs project, an EU-funded programme implemented across four provinces: KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
The programme exists because, in South Africa, more than a quarter of households still experience inadequate access to food, and youth unemployment sits above 45 percent, with women's unemployment not far behind.
REACH CSOs works to change that by strengthening the capacity, governance and advocacy skills of grassroots civil society organisations, with the development of green agri-food social enterprises forming one part of that wider effort to give young people and women a route into an economy that has largely excluded them. Luhnyezi Farms is listed among the programme's partner enterprises, and on 29 September, as an implementation partner, Sithole will host the programme's KwaZulu-Natal ecosystem mapping workshop.
It is a fitting turn for someone whose business grew out of Oribi's incubation process. Having built a green agri-food enterprise from the ground up, in a rural community, and having weathered a shock that could have ended it, she is now opening her own doors to help other grassroots organisations do the same. It is heritage in the sense that Oribi tries to work: knowledge and capacity moving outward, from one entrepreneur to the next, rather than staying locked inside a single farm or a single success story.
What Heritage Day means, seen through this work
"Coming from a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal has strongly influenced the business I am building," Sithole says. "It has shown me both the potential that exists within our communities and the barriers faced by rural entrepreneurs, particularly women and young people."
That is why her ambition for Luhnyezi Farms was never only about the products on a shelf. She wants to prove that a business rooted in a rural community can also become an innovative manufacturer, an exporter, and a genuine contributor to global value chains, without needing to leave that community behind to do it.
"My heritage reminds me that progress does not mean leaving our roots behind," she says. "It means taking the knowledge, resilience and values that we inherit and using them to build something even stronger."
That is also how Oribi sees its own work on a day like this. Heritage, for an incubator built to strengthen civil society organisations and support women and youth entrepreneurship, including in green agri-food enterprises, is not a fixed inheritance to be preserved behind glass. It is the resilience, land, food knowledge and community ties that rural entrepreneurs like Sithole already carry, given the mentorship, skills and networks to grow into something that outlasts any one harvest or grant cycle.
Through Luhnyezi Farms, and now through her rol
e on REACH CSOs, Sithole is not just honouring where she comes from. She is actively building the version of South Africa's agricultural heritage that her children, and other people's children, will inherit next.
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