LUSAKA: An hour from Zambia's capital Lusaka, towards the end of a 30-kilometre highway and an 18-kilometre unsealed road, Johnken Farm stands out like an oasis among the wilderness of Africa.

This farm, as wild as any other surrounding unclaimed land 12 years ago, has become a symbol of Chinese-Zambian co-operation in agriculture.

Eggs produced on Johnken Farm are sent to Lusaka and other cities every day, supplying 10 per cent of the total eggs sold in Zambia.

Together with its 1,000 head of cattle and over 2,000 pigs, the 3,500-hectare farm is the biggest of a dozen Chinese-owned farms in Zambia.

Behind Johnken's success is middle-aged Chinese woman Li Li, 43, who came to Zambia to support her husband, Wang Chi, former managing director of the farm. She ended up shouldering the task by herself when Wang passed away one and a half years ago.

Wang was a university lecturer in Beijing before he arrived in Zambia to fulfil his African dream. His wife Li gave up her nursing career in one of Beijing's famous hospitals to follow Wang to Johnken Farm.

They began by cutting down bush and grassland along with 100-plus local employees to turn the area into cultivable farmland.

Electricity was then connected to the farm and boreholes were drilled for irrigation.

"We started from scratch," Li reminisced in her sitting room decorated with a variety of African wooden artwork and a shelf of agronomic books.

They came to the farm in 1994 with 200 chickens. As there was no henhouse at that time, they had to share their house with the chickens.

Li recalled that at the beginning neither she nor Wang knew the proper water temperature for plucking until they finally looked it up shortly before they put their processed chicken on the market.

Going back and forth between the farm and Lusaka every weekday is often lonely. Li said she was robbed three times by armed bandits, as if she was telling the story of others.

With its good reputation and considerable return of profit, Johnken Farm was given a loan of about US$1 million by the Zambian National Commercial Bank (ZANACO).

With the loan, Johnken Farm began expanding its business by planting wheat after it installed a computer-controlled centre-pivot sprinkling irrigation system, which is widely used in large-scale commercial farms but was the first one in a Chinese-owned farm in Zambia.

"You have to become big and strong with modern advanced technologies and have a bearing on the market. Otherwise you will risk being edged out of the market," Li said.

With that in mind, she suggests that small- and medium-sized Chinese farms in Zambia merge to challenge the competition from other large-scale farms.

But the success of Johnken Farm has been overshadowed by Li's personal loss. In early 2005, her husband died in a car accident en route to Lusaka. He was buried on the farm that he loved so much.

The burden of heading the 200-worker farm fell all of a sudden to the shoulders of Li.

She said she would not give up as this is the life she chose 12 years ago. Perhaps there is too much here in Zambia that she cannot leave behind.

Outside the window of Li's house in the farm is Wang's tomb, embraced by tender cypress trees planted by his friends to carry their mourning. A bundle of chrysanthemums sits atop the tomb, yellow and fresh.

Li said her husband used to enjoy watching cows return home from pasture at dusk, standing just on the highland where the tomb is now.

(China Daily 11/04/2006 page3)