Mining & Trade News

Historically commercial agriculture has been a male dominated sector. In recent years the advancements in mechanisation and agricultural technologies have levelled the “playing field” and opened the doorway to gender equality within the sector. Farming and Engineering Services Limited Malawi (FES) who have been operating in this space since 1967 and are one of the most progressive and transformative players in the agricultural contracting and ag tech sector have demonstrated this through their adoption of female operators to man their equipment.

Some of the highly specialised contracting operations conducted by the dedicate women of FES include drone aerial survey, land forming and drone chemical crop protection. More than half of the pilots employed by FES to operate their fleet of DJI Agras T16/20/30 drones, which were developed at a cost of over R400-million, are young local females. Clayton Prowse, the Operations Manager at the FES Nchalo operation in Chikwawa, stated that “the female pilots operate in a less reckless manner and are less inclined to take unnecessary risks. This results in reduced downtime and improves mechanical availability of the equipment”. These female drone pilots are also responsible for drone based RTK topographical surveys using a fleet of DJI Phantom 4 RTKs and Matrice drones. The surveys are used as an input to the OptiSurface and MultiPlane software packages used to redesign fields for optimal surface water management. These designs are then uploaded to RTK guidance systems within the Challenger 865C/E tractors. These tractors pull 18 cubic meter dual land-forming scrapers to reshape the field surface for effective water management. This operation is coincidentally also predominantly performed by one of their most trusted and female operators, Mary Thalo. Mary has been with FES since 2012 and is a multiskilled operator, who aside from the land-forming, is also responsible for operating a tile-plough to install sub-surface drainage pipes and doubles as an operator on some of the larger yellow-plant equipment.

Commercial agricultural operations are about more than just operating equipment, there are also many supporting functions within the sector. AgriLab, a part of the FES group, is an ISO 17025 certified soil, water and leaf analysis laboratory. AgriLab endeavours to uplift local and international farmers by helping them increase the productivity of their soils through soil and leaf analysis followed up by fertilizer recommendations. Within the lab several of the lead scientists are also female. Other positions such as managers, mechanics, auto electrician and back-office staff, which have traditionally been filled by male employees, are now increasingly being filled by female employees. Justin Domleo, FES Group Head of Contracting, attributes this to “the increased number of female graduates passing through academic institutions and training academies operating in the sector, such as the African Drone and Data Academy in Malawi”. 

This is great news for employers in the sector as there is now a greater number of suitably qualified candidates from which to recruit and gender is not considered to be a selection criterion. In a sector where female participation has in the past been skewed toward the unskilled positions such as manual weeding, the new norm is a more naturally balanced and fair environment. 

Operating in a country where the UN gender inequality index ranks 173 of 189, FES is proud to support women in agriculture and promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

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