Animal ‘weed-eaters' to the rescue!

JP de Villiers has not used any herbicides on his farm for the past three seasons. He spoke to Glenneis Kriel about his use of sheep, pigs and chickens to overcome soil health problems in his orchards and vineyards.

- Glenneis Kriel

Four years ago, JP de Villiers, who farms on Goedemoed in the Keisie Valley near Paarl, realised he could not continue farming as usual. He was applying more and more herbicides and fertilisers, and double doses of insecticides, with poorer and poorer results.

“I was struggling with weeds and red spider mite, and of the 83ha I have under fruit and wine grape production and 25ha under apricots and plums, the yield was less than 10t/ha,” he says.

“I was barely breaking even despite following production advice to the letter.”

Then Hardie Brink of Real IPM introduced De Villiers to Fritz Breytenbach in the Robertson Valley and Ted Stanford in Wolseley. Both farmers had achieved good results with farming practices that embraced nature, instead of trying to subdue it with chemicals.

Breytenbach used weeds as cover crops in his orchards and vineyards, and produced almost double the regional wine grape average.

De Villiers realised that soil health was at the root of his problem. He started researching alternative production methods on the Internet and visited 22 farmers to see what they were doing to improve their soil. “Many of these farmers still use conventional farming practices, but each of them did at least one thing that resonated with the regenerative farming philosophy, be it the use cover crops or mulch to keep the soil covered, minimum- to no-tillage to disturb the soil as little as possible, maintaining living roots in the ground year round, or the integration of livestock into their production systems,” says De Villiers.

REVELATIONS