Bertie and Alette: Regenerative farming at Lowerland Farm

Tell us a little about yourself!

I grew up on Lowerland farm and was always drawn to nature—growing peas, radishes, watermelons, and any seeds I could find around wet spots or trees. I even started an earthworm farm for bait during my fishing expeditions on the Orange River, where I spent most of my childhood hunting, fishing, and reading. Later, I attended boarding school, then university in Stellenbosch, where I pursued a BSc degree, started a band, and launched a record and events company (which extended my studies).

I lived on a farm outside Somerset West until deciding to return to our family farm in 2013. Wine has been a consistent thread throughout my life. My father was a connoisseur who used to dream about building a cellar on Lowerland, even though we only farmed sultana grapes for raisins at the time. Viticulture was where I began implementing organic and regenerative practices when I started farming, and it remains my great passion, along with cattle.

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

Alette deserves the credit for the path we chose. She grew up outside Bloemfontein on a beautiful smallholding, studied journalism in Pretoria, and later came to work in Stellenbosch where we met as housemates on a wine farm. She joined our events operations months later, and things evolved from there.

Her passions for gardening and cooking led her to attend permaculture and natural building courses before we began farming full-time. While still in Stellenbosch, she developed an interest in food as medicine, healthy eating, and organic farming practices. She introduced me to permaculture concepts, and we started composting and gardening for ourselves while envisioning how these regenerative systems could work on a broader scale.

We were always passionate about farming for the final food product—we wanted to farm wine not just grapes, bread not just wheat, steaks and briskets not just cattle. This perspective shaped our vision for Lowerland: to produce a diverse basket of healthy, nutritious food at great value for consumers while regenerating our soils and our social and natural environment.

We were fortunate to join a family farm during a transitional period that required rethinking the operation's future. We began by managing the vineyards and pecan orchards, immediately converting to organic practices. From there, we developed our wine brand and expanded into grains (stoneground flours), vegetables, honey, nuts, and pastured meats.

The journey to our current approach involved many trials and failures—some devastatingly large that set us back years, others smaller. These challenges came from weather events, river floods, power outages, human disagreements, and errors in judgment.

Along the way, learning from these mistakes, we realised even more that it can only work once all parts of the puzzle is present and operational. From grains to perennials, no-tillage and cover crops to, most importantly, the animals (lots of animals). From ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep etc) to monogastric (chickens, pigs etc) and to get them all into the most efficient grazing patterns, in a sensible scale relative to each other, and to let them be the most natural versions of themselves in this bigger whole.

We're still very much in the middle of this process, and it will likely be an ongoing journey through these ideas, challenges, and interactive growth.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

We're proud of persevering through many challenges and making difficult structural decisions when necessary. While we're still far from our goals, each day brings us closer. We take pride in our products, which embody the quality and integrity we strive for, and in our team both on and off the farm, as well as our clients.

It takes time to excel at something like pastured beef and to match or exceed the quality of conventional production systems. The challenge of regenerative farming lies in understanding the conflicts between short-term and long-term considerations across production sectors, manufacturing, and markets. This includes effects on soil, mechanical and human resources, and how everything fits into the market—the basket of goods, volumes, and price points.

For instance, if you scale the pig operation beyond the existing basket, without scaling customers, you are falling back on a commodity market for pork, which is not always part of the plan. This counts for every single product, from growing organic wheat to milling the flour to baking with your clients. There is the element and understanding of the long plan like varieties or cultivars in wheat, the breeds or inherent genetic qualities in cattle, to the shorter actions like managing of pests and weeds or diseases in a regenerative way. On a broad scale this can be especially challenging), feeding rations for animals, grazing decisions, team dynamics and cash flows.

We've come to understand that our operation can only thrive as one complex but coherent system. For this to succeed without spiraling into chaos, the human element is crucial. We focus on internship programs and other initiatives to create understanding and leadership, building teams that can take ownership and design at a human scale, simplifying complexity and creating exponential growth patterns.

What is the most helpful piece of advice you received when you were just starting out? 

Many mentors have appeared at various times—farmers, chefs, bakers, butchers, professors, agronomists, friends, and family. We're also grateful for clients who embraced direct-to-consumer relationships with us and helped shape our design.

One piece of advice that stands out came from James Moffett, who told me that the challenge with agriculture at a commodity scale is that we "only have 6 months to prove something," as that's how long banks, co-ops, and trials run on grain crops. This made me realize we needed to escape that system and shift our focus to long-term systems, soils, and natural rhythms.

What advice would you like to give to others who are younger/earlier on their journey? 

I think the best advice would be to start with the market or off-take agreements. For larger-scale operations, animals are key to soil health and holistic regenerative systems. I initially imagined a 50/50 balance, but now believe it should be around 80/20 if a cropping system is circular and free from synthetic inputs.

For new farmers without land, there are creative entry points, such as grazing other farmers' orchards or crop stubble when they need natural services but don't have animals themselves.

Where do you see growing going in South Africa? 

Our current challenge is aligning our production systems and planning with logistics and market needs. Perhaps through a membership model where both parties can plan together. We're at an interesting point in food production where consumers care deeply about what they eat, where it comes from, and the integrity of producers and processes.

Yet everyone remains price-conscious, and it's impossible to fully factor the positive externalities of truly regenerative systems into pricing models. Terminology can be confusing, making it difficult even for dedicated customers to navigate the differences between systems and models.

I believe we're collectively building a better marketplace where consumers can access proper grassfed beef from multiple farms, so they don't need to resort to questionable retail options when their preferred supplier runs out. The more producers we have in this space, the quicker we can collectively learn and improve.