Study abroad program builds lasting food security partnerships in South Africa

When the van carrying Virginia Tech students turned onto the dirt road leading to her farm, Vivian Zilo-Ncana began to sing.

Dozens of people from her South African township joined in, ululating and dancing. As students and faculty stepped out of the van, people in the crowd reached for their hands and pulled them into the celebration.

At the edge of the gathering sat a gleaming red tractor — a gift from Virginia Tech students, faculty, alumni, and friends. The result of two years of fundraising, the machine will help Zilo-Ncana increase her farm’s productivity and feed children and families in the Khayelitsha township of roughly 400,000 residents.

“You are making a huge difference, not only for me, but for the entire community,” she told the group. “This tractor isn’t just a piece of machinery. It represents the shift from struggling to survive to finally having the capacity to thrive.”

Zilo-Ncana named it The Link — a fitting moniker for a partnership that now spans three years and nearly 8,000 miles.

Since 2023, faculty members and students have worked alongside Zilo-Ncana and other South African partners through Connect and Serve Communities Abroad, a service-based winter study abroad course focused on food security. The visit lasts two weeks, but the collaboration extends year-round through classwork, research, and sustained engagement — the land-grant model at work across continents.

Growing vegetables from sand

Under the glare of the midday sun in 95-degree heat, crop and soil sciences major Zach Gilbreath crouched in the dirt beside Khayelitsha resident Bulelwa Dyonta, measuring out a spinach bed with string and tape. They checked the spacing together, pressed seedlings into the sandy soil, and talked through nutrient balance and water retention.

The lesson was drafted months earlier in Professor Ozzie Abaye’s Agriculture, Global Food Security and Health class, then refined in virtual meetings with Zilo-Ncana’s team before the group arrived.

Over the next two days on the farm, the students led 15 women from Khayelitsha in hands-on workshops on soil preparation, seedling production, buffer plants, and intercropping techniques.

“These women are going to go back to their township and teach their families, teach their neighbors, and teach other people in their communities how to produce their own food,” Gilbreath said. “The knowledge just spreads from there.”

Known in her community as “Mama Vivian,” Zilo-Ncana founded Iliso Care Society in 2004 as a nonprofit nutrition program. Her organization has since expanded into youth development, school feeding programs, and agricultural training.

In 2023, the government granted her land near Cape Town to grow food for surrounding communities. She now farms roughly 75 acres, producing vegetables that support three daily meals for local schoolchildren and supplying surplus produce to 3,800 residents a week. The farm also serves as an agricultural training hub for about 100 people a month.

But the land came with few resources. The soil is more than 95 percent sand. Equipment is scarce. For years, Zilo-Ncana relied on rented machinery to prepare the fields, limiting how much she could plant.

When Abaye and fellow College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty members Mark Reiter and Pete Ziegler first visited the farm in 2023, they saw those challenges as opportunities to serve.

“We knew we had the tools to help,” Abaye said. “We saw her ambition to feed her community and her love for her community. That was the driving force for us — to equip her with the agricultural training to match her ambition.”  

The tractor, which Abaye and her students fundraised for over two years by soliciting friends, family, and alumni, is only the most recent example of how the university is helping.

Reiter, professor and director of the Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and his graduate student set up research plots to determine which soil treatments would help the farm hold nutrients, retain water, and produce more reliable yields. Over time, those trials became the Western Cape Research and Education Farm, or WeCaRE, a Virginia Tech research site embedded within Zilo-Ncana’s fields.

Since the trials began, improved soil management has helped the farm triple its yields.

“Our job is to give people the tools they need to grow food,” Reiter said. “We’re identifying the soil practices that will help Mama Vivian grow more productively and more consistently. At the same time, we’re learning how sandy soils respond to organic inputs under heat, wind, and water stress — challenges that farmers in parts of Virginia are also facing.”

Edible soil and lingering lessons

Zilo-Ncana is one of three service partners in the Connect and Serve program. Over the past three years, students have also worked with Oude Molen Eco Garden, an educational community garden, to develop informational signs, seed packets, and horticulture lessons for the more than 1,000 children that visit the garden each month.

On a hot summer day in January, Virginia Tech students weeded, planted, and harvested seeds. Afterward, they gathered with local schoolchildren around a long wooden picnic table to build “edible soil” using clear plastic cups, cereal, crushed cookies, and gummy worms. Environmental science major Steven Conder helped lead the lesson, explaining how organic matter, organisms, and minerals work together beneath the surface.

Students developed the activity during the fall semester in Blacksburg and refined it in virtual meetings with the garden’s manager, Kelly Mansfield, before the trip. It will now become part of her regular school programming.

“What you see around you is what they’ve helped build,” Mansfield said. “And I’m still building on it.”

Establishing food forests

At Sakumlandela Primary School in Khayelitsha, Virginia Tech students helped turn a 50-by-50-foot patch of dirt into a fledgling food forest. Over six hours, they cleared grass and rubble, added compost, and installed thousands of plants, including fruit trees, that will grow into a canopy of trees, shrubs, and groundcover.

In a township with limited access to green space and fresh produce, the Sakumlandela food forest will provide herbs for the school kitchen and serve as an outdoor classroom.

The installation was the second supported through their three-year partnership with Urban Harvest, a nonprofit that builds regenerative school and community gardens.

Part of the preparation began in Abaye’s course in the fall, where students created educational materials to accompany the installation. They designed plant labels with QR codes linking each species to Urban Harvest’s website, giving teachers and students a way to learn more about what’s growing on campus.

The new site builds on earlier work at another township school, where students helped establish a 1,100-square-foot garden and developed lesson plans still in use.

“Their contribution was not symbolic,” Urban Harvest founder Ben Getz said. “It was substantial and lasting.”

A partnership year-round

The projects students implement in South Africa begin months earlier in Blacksburg and continue well beyond the trip.

In the fall, students team up and select projects identified by their service partners. Throughout the semester, they meet virtually with collaborators, draft lesson plans and materials, and revise them based on feedback. By the time they board the plane in January, the plans are ready to be put into action.

For many students, participating in the program is made possible through scholarship support from the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, the Global Education Office, and long-standing partners including the Virginia Corn Board, the Virginia Soybean Board, and the Virginia Crop Improvement Association.

At Zilo-Ncana’s farm, faculty members and students manage the WeCaRE research site, where compost and cover crop trials test ways to improve sandy soil. The side-by-side plots allow local growers to see which practices produce stronger crops, while the findings shape the next year’s coursework.

For Zilo-Ncana, the consistency matters as much as the research.

“Working with Virginia Tech is different,” she said. “They come back. They understand what we need, and they follow through.”

Back in Blacksburg, students carry on that work through Harvesting Hope, a campus organization that raises awareness and funds to support Zilo-Ncana and Iliso Care Society. The group has held used clothing sales and sold hot chocolate to help fundraise for the new tractor.

Junior Lilliana Escobar helped found the organization in response to her South Africa study abroad experience. She said Abaye’s class — and the trip that followed — shifted her perspective.

“It made me realize I was in the wrong field,” she said.

After returning, Escobar changed her major to agricultural and applied economics and added a minor in global food security and health. Starting Harvesting Hope, she said, was a way to extend the work once she returned home.

“We noticed all the socioeconomic challenges that Mama Vivian’s community faces,” she said. “We felt the need to become global citizens and do something about what we saw. But food insecurity is a worldwide issue, and we want to bring that awareness here too.”

The link that endures

For Will Ubben, the experience also sparked a long-term commitment. He first traveled to South Africa on the Connect and Serve trip as an undergraduate studying environmental science.

“As we were getting ready to leave, Mama Vivian grabbed my hand and said, ‘Please don’t go,’” Ubben recalled. “That’s not something that will soon leave my mind. It became clear that I can make change here.”

He is now a master’s degree student in crop and soil environmental science, helping guide the study abroad trip and manage the research plots at Zilo-Ncana’s farm. His thesis focuses on how soil health practices tested in those plots, including compost and cover crops, help the soil hold water and deliver nutrients to crops under heat, wind, and limited irrigation.

The work is intended to strengthen productivity in Khayelitsha and offer practical guidance to farmers on Virginia’s Eastern Shore facing similar challenges.

“Traveling to South Africa showed me that service has to be part of whatever you do,” he said. “You can build a career and still make a difference.”

The tractor named The Link remains an enduring reminder of that commitment.

In a letter to the Virginia Tech team, Zilo-Ncana reflected on what the tractor — and the partnership behind it — has come to represent.

“Every time we start the engine, we are reminded that we aren’t working this land alone,” she wrote. “We will not just be growing crops anymore. We will be growing a partnership that spans oceans.”