After leaving Michelle & Nick’s place (& getting a very dodgy mudmap off Nick!) we managed to drive about 50 klms further than we needed to when trying to find our next farm visit. Found ourselves halfway up a rocky mountain on a dirt road getting narrower by the minute, when we eventually stopped at a boundary gate that had a warning sign on it threatening dogs, guns, handcuffs, poison & death by a thousand cuts….so we decided to turn back. Then making our retreat we ran into ‘Anton’ who we were looking for, as his staff had mentioned a strange vehicle going straight past their house earlier. Not to worry, as we had a good look around this incredibly rugged valley of which Anton & his wife Katrina own about 12,000 acres. Except for the lower creek flats & irrigation areas, the rest of the whole area is almost vertical & covered in broken stone and plenty of Thorn trees. Once we could get over the shock of people actually living here & got a chance to have a look around we invariably find they have plenty going on, and they all have beautiful houses & loads of staff. This couple has just started with RCS and is going through the Business Link program & I have a feeling that they may be in for some big changes & a wild ride over the next few years. Currently they have quite a complex enterprise mix with about 100 Hectares of irrigation to compliment the low rainfall and challenging grazing ‘camps’ (paddocks). They have cattle, Dohne merinos (sometimes joined to Dorper), Boer meat goats & Angora goats for Mohair production, and seemed to me to have far too many competing enterprises, causing difficulty with grazing control & way too labour intensive. Although labour may be cheap, it is still a cost & management intensive situation for Anton to maintain the 15 plus people on their books.

      Also, I didn’t mention that they run a tourism enterprise as well, with accommodation for up to 16 guests at a time, mainly based around wild game hunting. The facility is very unique & has a markedly different selling point in that the ‘rooms’ are covered Ox wagons set in a half circle around another camp surrounded by towering peaks reminiscent of an old western movie. Although there is an incredible amount of stone in this country, once we were driven up the hillside I was surprised at the amount of grass about due to the lack of desire for animals to climb up there to get it. The road itself had me holding my breath at times, especially with Anton telling stories of how his mum once left him in the vehicle as a seven year old & the truck rolled over the edge and he only survived because he was thrown out! Also, the Baboons don’t make it any easier as they have an annoying habit of pelting great big rocks onto the road which was already rough enough…

      When we left there we were given much better directions than the previous move, & also decided to kick the GPS back into gear to make sure. It wasn’t that long a haul this time again & we were soon into the thriving metropolis of Graaf Rinett, where I couldn’t believe there was also a ‘Harley Davidson’ rally happening. Now those that know crazy ‘Peca’ will maybe also know that he is a fanatical “Harley” owner and general car, boat & bike freak and I had thoughts of probably not being able to ever get him out of town to visit any farms at all. However, after he had drooled over all the chrome, fat tires & predominantly black fashion on display I managed to finally get him back into the car & on the road again. I wouldn’t have minded if the only local internet café was open but the hundreds of bikies roaring into town must have been a deterrent to opening that afternoon & it probably cost them plenty.

      Our destination was the ‘Kroon’ farm “Excelsior”, about a supposedly 45 minutes out of town, although Pec got us there in fewer than 35 to surprise our hosts along a quite winding & mountainous gravel road. Now this is a place I was keen to see and had been recommended to do so by several people on my travels as they are the earliest practioners of the Savory / Parsons philosophy in Africa, & probably the world.

One thing I was not expecting to see out here was the extent of this mountainous terrain for such a low rainfall environment & to feel such cold weather. Roland & Sam Kroon have been our hosts for two days and it has been another fantastic visit & these people are yet another example of dynamic positive thinking, and I am continuing to be inspired. Also another great house with a Mediterranean feel set in a beautiful garden with about 4 Hectares of irrigated grass on a flat out the front & water running past in little spring fed streams, and all surrounded by towering rugged mountains.

I’ll have to mention Peca’s first comment when we arrived…

“So Sam, this is a new house then that you and Roland live in?”

“Well no not exactly, it was actually built in 1796….” Said Sam, with me rolling around in the back ground laughing.

He’d been ribbing me about a stupid comment I’d made to Allan Savory for weeks, so it was good to have the score evened up. In his defense though, part of the house was new & it was freshly painted & in really good condition. Yeah, and 200 years isn’t that far out….

We went for a big farm tour the next morning & I was very thankful for the coat Roland lent me as the back of the Ute (or ‘backy’ as they call them here) was on the chilly side of freezing. Roly, Pec & I were on the back with Sam in the front as chauffeur along with four kids. And no wonder it is cold here as their farm has mountains with altitudes higher than Kosciusko, & from the top of one spectacular peak we could look over most of their 5,500 Hectares & straight across to another that was over 8,000 feet. The annual rainfall is a bit higher here on the hill tops but the farm’s average is only around the 14 inch mark, and I find it difficult to associate the low rainfall with the mountains as there is nowhere in Australia anything like this. They have had a big challenge here in this environment with managing animals for effective change in the landscape and are now capitalizing on all the effort. Another recent breakthrough with the use of a by-pass protein lick allowing them to more effectively utilise unpalatable grasses & will see the carrying capacity increased even further & cattle numbers possibly doubled to compliment the Merino breeding enterprise also here. They are now capturing all rainfall on the farm with increased ground cover to the extent that two more springs that had been dry for decades have started to run again. One hundred years ago the place had 14 fresh water springs but by the middle of last century that number had dropped to 3, and now they are effectively bringing them back to life. Exciting stuff!!

However, that is just one enterprise for this dynamic duo & we were soon to be blown away by the diversity of yet another business seemingly situated in the middle of nowhere, and just down the road from “The Valley of Desolation”.

Roland also has a contract fencing business that has 5 teams on the go, employing up to seventy men & doing a lot of ‘game park’ fencing which is a rapidly growing industry here. He also has a farm supplies enterprise & is agent for Gallagher products in South Africa, and he is in charge of the RCS investment advisory group down here that is helping farmers spread their risk by using their farm equity ‘off farm’.

But along with all that….. they have set up in a shed next door a massive & complex freeze drying machine that produces a product with the potential to revolutionise nutrition and health benefits all over the world. Somehow (and with plenty of trial & error) these two have designed a method of drying various sprouts etc, all grown here, at a critical stage in development and with such speed that the full nutritional benefits are locked into the resulting material and in a form that our bodies can actually access. With all of the billions of dollars involved in the world wide pharmaceutical industry, the big companies have yet to developed a way of replicating in a laboratory a ‘pill’ that can deliver the nutritional benefits that our failing food system is meant to be doing. That’s why the ‘supplements’ industry is booming & yet most of it is wasted money because our bodies just cannot access the form it’s in, so the benefit is nothing more than urine colouring.

The amount of research they have put into this boggles my mind, although it must be very frustrating to have the huge challenge of marketing such a product when the power of ‘the big boys’ under threat is against you.

I’ll be watching the progress of this one & hopefully be taking some home to try.

Pec & I went down last night to another house on the farm where Roland’s mum ‘Wendy’ lives to have a chat & a drink with her before dinner. Her family go back in this area to about 1802 when the great grandfather came out from Scotland to settle here at Graaf Rinett & as a “Murray” I wonder if there is any connection to the Louth Murray’s…  Wendy also has had an incredible journey & her married life began with a 1,500 mile dirt road into Namibia to a farm her husband bought in the middle of a drought, and a six week stint ‘on the road’ with a thousand hungry cattle.

It was there in Namibia back in the late sixties that they first had contact & worked with Allan Savory & Stan Parsons who were working together then with some revolutionary new concepts they had been developing, so they were the first to utilise this thinking and had great success.

Unfortunately her husband passed away at an early age in the seventies, leaving her with three young children & several farms to manage on her own back here in the Eastern Cape. By utilizing consultancy off her friends Stan & Allan, and no doubt her own substantial ability & keen mind for business, she has been able to continue a legacy of ‘Kroon” innovation and success throughout this district that she can be proud of.

Her fathers story is also worthy of a mention as in 1962 he had amassed a land empire of some 500,000 acres & was running in excess of 100,000 sheep which is comparable to some of the big operators in Australia around that time. However, the story then became tragic with him suffering a stroke & subsequent family turmoil & mismanagement seeing much of it squandered and lost. Amazingly diverse history in this area & in South Africa in general & I’d be hard pressed to think of a more interesting country to visit.

Till next instalment….