From piano teacher to stud breeder

This article showed how a farmer intended to put the sheep and cattle studs of the farm where she had grown up back on the map.

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In 1990, music school teacher Emmarentia Botha quit town life to go farming at Skuilhoek in the Luckhoff area of the Free State.

It was quite a change, but because she had grown up on this family farm, her love for animals helped her make progress.

CONTINUING HER FATHER'S WORK

She has continued with the Skuilhoek Brown Swiss stud which her father, the late Chris Blumenthal, started decades ago. However, the main farming enterprise is the Merino flock of 670 animals consisting of both stud and commercial sheep.

In the past the sheep were often artificially inseminated, and Botha has plans to return to this method of breeding, but for the time being she is making use of natural mating. Rams from her own stud are mainly used now, but she also buys in one or two rams a year.

Each year she selects about six young rams and enters them into the Middelburg (Cape) Veld Ram Club's testing scheme. Her son-in-law, Lukie Erasmus, who has much experience with sheep, helps her with the selection and grading of all her sheep.

Each year, the Veld Ram Club has an auction and the ownership of the rams is kept secret.