As Kanangwa Newlove walked through her 10-acre farm just outside Lusaka, Zambia, one day in October 2025, she felt as if her dreams were withering away in front of her. The spinach, lettuce and mustard wilted in the heat. Tomatoes shriveled on their vines. She uprooted entire rows of organic vegetables – once sought-after by discerning customers, now rotting in the sun – and fed them to her pigs.

"The crops that suffered the most without water were our mainstay," she told a reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. "There was nothing we could do. There was no water for the crops because there was no electricity."

Every few days, she needed nearly 8,000 gallons of water from borehole pumps to keep her farm going. The pumps required a reliable supply of electricity – but, since March 2024, Zambia's rolling blackouts had left swaths of the country without power, turning everyday tasks into Herculean struggles. Sometimes she had only four hours of power a day.

The blackouts had a "cascading effect," Newlove said. Without electricity she couldn't refrigerate the few meager vegetables she could harvest. She stopped breeding and slaughtering animals. She was unable to sell to many of her regular customers, such as local mom-and-pop shops. She had to drastically reduce the area she farmed and cut back on planting, and she couldn't hire seasonal workers.

The rolling blackouts affecting Newlove's farm were a result of "load shedding," scheduled power cuts meant to reduce demand on the grid. ZESCO, the state-owned power company supplying almost all of Zambia's energy needs, alerted its customers to the load shedding schedule, but these schedules weren't consistent or reliable, Newlove told ICIJ, making it hard to plan how to maintain – or save – her crops. "One week you'd get a schedule from, say, morning to midday and you'd make a plan based on that," she said. "Then, without prior notice, it would change."

She couldn't run a farm on four hours of electricity. For the first time since she'd started the farm over a decade earlier – a labor of love launched while whe was working for a social enterprise – she began to wonder if she'd need to shut it down. "Farmers are optimistic people until that is obliterated entirely by reality," she said. "It's a mammoth thing to fathom, that you're going to kill a business that you've worked so hard for for so many years."