There’s a melon in Botswana that produces more fruit in years of drought than in rainy years. The lerotze is a cooking melon which is commonly eaten in various forms in Botswana. In rainy years, it slurps up the water and gets a bit lazy and doesn’t fruit. But when drought hits, it gets stressed and decides it better produce some flowers.
With the changing climate, Botswana is getting drier and drier and that makes melons like the lerotze very appealing to farmers. But often in drought years, the farmers get so many lerotze in their fields that they just leave them there and livestock will eat them.
Mrs Masego Ramolaise, a farmer in a village near Molepolole in Botswana, came up with a method for producing a lerotze juice. She knew how to grow the melons and how to make the juice but didn’t know how to get it to market so she could make some extra income for her family. She attended a training session organised by NARDI, the national agricultural research institute, and the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture. NARDI taught her some more recipes for different foods and helped her refine her juice. She learned how to get the proper licenses to produce food in her home and how to get a nutritional analysis. And she learned how to take it to market.
Now, Masego employs some helpers to help her produce the juice in quantities and sells it to people organising functions like weddings.
But Masego didn’t stop with lerotze juice. She saw that most local beer brewers were importing sorghum malt from South Africa. That seemed a bit crazy as sorghum is one of Botswana’s main crops. So she got a milling machine and started making and selling her own malt at a nice profit. Masego showed me how she makes her juice and malt and then we toasted her success with some of the local sorghum beer.
All images used on this page were photographed by Michael Major for the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture and used here under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0