FARMING!?

SOME STOEPTALK REFLECTIONS.

How I do miss stoeptalk, especially on ‘farming’, now that I have sort of reverse-semigrated into an aged retirement bubble as a tenant at Somerset West in the Cape. Even so, I am rediscovering much stoeptalk, also on farming: because I am lucky to be as alive as you are; reading.

One major salvation here is reflected – admittedly some 125 years later, and on a different scale - from an extract of a toverview donor’s nuwe hantam archive. This, recorded on farming around 1904, is bequeathed in the Rhodes/Beit/Bailey (RBB) syndicate by farm manager, Morton William Barnes Webb’s memoir - headed, simply, FARMING.

Don’t for a second think things are that simple! My relief, is that this opening archive entry to 2026, can prove as engaging as did the previous closing 2025 newsletter extract from Barnes Webb headed Water, which invited so many toverview interactions. (link?)

In passing, it is fun and interesting, and food for thought, as to how perceptive syndicate manager Barnes Webb was to his experiential early 1900’s work in the Umsobomvu municipal district of today.

MARKETS. TECHNOLOGIES. GLOBAL TO LOCAL

Not to shy away from changes, including probably at the coming local government elections in this and other areas, its is surely sobering to wonder critically whether the more things change the more they often seem the same?

While change remains a critical constant over a century later, as daily illustrated also in farming, the Barnes-Webb farm manager’s reflections here also very clearly underline that 1) markets and 2) technologies and 3) global factors remain key performance indicators to opening gates to maybe local is lekker and to perhaps not too lekker?

Anticipating our further coverage and range of views on the impending local government elections, I am tempted to suggest that the same ever changing, dramatic agents (or ‘motive forces’ if you like) of 1) enduring inequalities in an area steadily transformed by 2) rural depletions and by 3) semi-rural peri-urban and urban expansions.

The contradictions remain, and often seem fascinatingly astounding.

FARMING

Transcribed into type by the late Marie Bares Webb, his daughter-in-law, here in a bold box is Morton Barnes Webb’s ‘farming’ entry.

Revisiting this today can lead to all sorts of fascinating and heated discussions, loads of jokes, some insistent ‘standpunte’ of opinion, and other entertaining times, often masked as endurable fact, and that is that, Finis & Klaar?

IS THE COFFEE ON TOP?

For example, very many coffee cups, ‘coming at intervals’, could occupy us today when we come to ponder or pontificate on such issues as soil content, syndicates, land barons, land holdings, colonial Indian cavalry, regenerating agriculture, old timers and young bloods, farmers , farm managers, farm workers, families, horses, sheep, angora goats, food, breeding, general expenses, and many interesting chats.

REGENERATIONS. BEAN-COUNTERS. SCALES?

Curiously, by today, the RBB scale of large-scale farming - which quite soon thereafter altered - has regenerated, judging by steady ongoing reduction in numbers of farms, in farm owners, farm managers, farm workers, and their families.¹

Another angle I have on ‘interesting chats with old timers’ referred to in the extract, recalls that the RBB syndicate could not get all the farms they were after at the time and also subsequently in turn sold out numbers of their once many farms.²

Another comparative observation is that it would seem that numbers of farmers in the area today could be more accurately described, as needing to be also part-time farmers or part-time businesspersons or dual farmer-survivor-businessfolk?

Any visit today to the area, and indeed to numbers of other similar areas – in spite of what the local municipal spins may claim – would see there are very few horses left, almost no angora goats, that sheep are both for global wool trade ;primarily now to China and India, and that mutton and increasingly beef production is including some jet plane refrigerated and blessed deep frozen packagings. and, that the golfing worlds of the likes of such as Gary Player have largely trekked away to other pastures?

Good stuff for stoep talk! Local, like global, can be lekker for some and can be not so lekker, for others. Never simple!

Finis & Klaar (?)