Farming – Agritech & Innovation · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
Selebi Phikwe was a mining town that lost its mine, and with it the single industry that gave the town its purpose. The search for a replacement has been long and uneven. One of the more tangible answers is agricultural: a citrus farm now employing over 300 workers, with plans announced in June 2026 to expand.
The substitution at the heart of the story is striking – from mine to orchard, from extraction to cultivation. It is also the kind of diversification Botswana has talked about for years and delivered less often, which is why a concrete jobs figure attached to a working farm is worth attention. Statements of intent are common; payrolls are not.
The Jobs Arithmetic
Over 300 workers is a real number for a town that has been short of them since the closure hollowed out its economic base. It does not replace a mine on its own; a single operation rarely matches the scale of industrial extraction, and it would be a disservice to the town to pretend otherwise. But it establishes something a feasibility study cannot: that the land around Selebi Phikwe can support labour-intensive agriculture at a meaningful headcount, which is the proof that has to come before anything larger is credible.
There is a difference, too, in the character of the jobs. Mining employment is concentrated and finite – tied to an ore body that eventually runs out, as Selebi Phikwe learned the hard way. Agricultural employment, properly watered and managed, renews each season. A town that has lived through the end of a non-renewable industry has reason to value an engine that does not deplete.
A mining town does not need one new mine; it needs an industry that keeps paying after the ore is gone.
The Expansion Constraint: Water and Processing
The expansion plan is where ambition meets the realities of a dry country. To grow, the farm is seeking investment in irrigation and processing – the two capabilities that decide whether citrus becomes a sustained industry or stays a single farm. Irrigation governs how much can be grown in a climate that does not give water away; processing governs how much value stays local rather than leaving the district as raw, low-margin fruit.
The processing point carries the larger development lesson. A region that only grows and ships raw produce captures the thinnest slice of the value chain and exports the rest of the margin elsewhere. Packing, grading, juicing or preserving on site is what keeps wages, skills and profit in Selebi Phikwe. For a town rebuilding from scratch, where the value is captured matters as much as how much fruit is grown.
Growing the fruit creates jobs; processing it nearby is what keeps the money in town.
Consultation as a Condition, Not a Courtesy
The push for stakeholder consultation reads as more than procedure. Selebi Phikwe has lived through the collapse of an employer that defined it, and a community burned once is right to ask how durable the next promise is. Consultation is how an expansion earns local trust rather than assuming it, and trust is not a soft consideration in a place with this history.
It also has a hard practical function. Citrus at scale needs water rights, land access and labour from the surrounding area – all of which run more smoothly when the people affected are brought in early rather than informed late. Done well, consultation lowers the risk of the disputes and delays that can stall an expansion before it earns back its capital.
After one broken engine, a town measures the next one by how openly it is built.
Selebi Phikwe's citrus farm will not be judged on the day it employs 300 people but on whether it still does in a decade, with processing and irrigation in place and a community that helped shape it. As a template for converting a post-mining economy into something that grows back each season, it is one of the more concrete experiments Botswana has running – and one the rest of the country's resource towns have reason to watch.
Sources: allAfrica
