Blog

Cyril Ramaphosa’s reprimand of farmers in the Boland must have come as a shock. Wasn’t Ramaphosa supposed to be ‘a champion for commercial farmers’?

If you look into a city-sky, you’ll probably see a plane or a helicopter once in a while. Fast forward to a few years from now, city slickers will be...

Ouboet – I find it exceedingly difficult to wrap my head around the fact that veld fires have destroyed more than 400 000ha in the Free State so far this...

Thank goodness we’ve eventually come to the end of the 2014 congress season.

Boet, you know how much I dread the annual congress season! But so far this year I’ve been very impressed by the standard of the agricultural congresses.

My heart aches for every person in South Africa who has lost a child, a spouse or a loved one to farm violence.

A farmer is a farmer is a farmer, irrespective of where you farm and what you farm with.

O glorious day! Winter has finally come. This is my favourite time of the year. I adore a cold winter.

You don’t need the Rosetta Stone to decode the message behind President Zuma’s appointment of NUM stalwart Senzeni Zokwana as the new minister of agriculture.

Can you imagine burning your grain lands and killing your livestock and then buying your food at vastly inflated prices from your neighbour?

Boeta, how I wish you could have attended this year’s Free State Young Farmer conference with me.

Jong, Ouboet, I’m telling you South Africa’s commercial cattle farmers really are world-class.

Snollygoster. What a delightful new word I’ve learnt! A ‘snollygoster’ is someone, especially a politician, who is guided by a desire for personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles,...

Jong Boet, some or other clever guy in history once said the people in a democracy deserve the government they get because they voted for it. What balderdash!! Let me...

And so the rains have come… blessings in abundance! Genadewater, as we in the Free State like to call it.

Dear Mr Zuma: This is Annelie from the Free State. I’m writing on behalf of myself and all the farmers I deal with. In this, your last election year, I...

Boet, I’ve seen many things in my life, but the drought in the North West is the closest I’ve come to hell on earth.

Mauritius really is what it’s jacked up to be. I’m not a beach person and I hate being sat down under an umbrella, smothered with suntan lotion.

Boeta, with genetics and genomics being the buzzwords of the century, let me tell you the story of Robert Bakewell, the farmer from Leicestershire who transformed the quality of Britain's...

I’ve tried and tried and tried again to find something positive to blog about this week. I’ve watched the news like a hawk and read every newspaper I could lay...