Julian May from McGregor & Cape Town

Tell us a little about yourself!

I was born two months before the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. Although my parents were middle-class white South Africans, they abhorred the policies of the ruling party. I was fortunate that I was brought up knowing the injustices of that time.  I was also fortunate that my father and his mother were keen gardeners. Nowadays my grandmother would be called a homesteader and our visits to her 5-acre farm provided fresh vegetables, fruit and eggs.

I taught myself how to cook food while a teenager and this is still one of my interests.  My mother was an author, and often too busy to pay much attention to meals.  Using the Time-Life Food of the World Series, I learned how to prepare Italian, French and Chinese food, very different from my family’s Anglo-Scottish cooking. 

My interest in small-scale farming grew during research conducted for my master’s degree.  Together with a social-psychology student, I spent two years at a mission hospital in rural Transkei.  Carey Ann and I married and have travelled through life together.  The labour, resilience and pride of the women we interviewed as they planted, hoed, reaped and processed food through the different seasons was inspiring. I still make use of my copy of “People’s Workbook” published by the Environmental Development Agency in 1981.

By 1988 we had to live outside South Africa.  However, we were determined to return as soon as we could, and so we decided to buy a home.  At that time McGregor was a four-hour drive from Cape Town, a remote village that had never been segregated.  We bought a mud-brick ‘platdak’ house and an acre of land.  Frikkie, Sampie, and now Danny worked with us taking care of the house and land while we worked in Mahikeng, Durban, Cape Town, and overseas.

When we returned to South Africa, I worked as a consultant with the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre, rejoined the University of Natal in 1997, and moved to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in 2012.  For most of my career, I focused on the causes and possible solutions to poverty.  Although I read widely about food and farming out of interest, I only began researching food systems in 2014 when I was asked to lead the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security.

We have been able to keep our homestead despite the demands of work.  The house, now almost 170 years old, hasn’t changed much from when we bought it.  But I am proud that the quality of the soil has dramatically improved. Generally, McGregor has poor shallow soils with a high clay content. 

The leiwater system causes salinity, and unused land is grazed and becomes compacted.  To solve these problems, every year we source 12 tons of compost from a local farmer who stables horses and keeps free range chickens in addition to making our own compost.  We also mix in 3 tons of river sand each year to make new raised beds or recondition old ones. We receive 41 000 litres of leiwater every second week during summer, about ¾ of what would be needed if the plot was cultivated fully.  We store this in two 31 000 litre reservoirs. We supplement this with borehole or municipal water when necessary and use drip irrigation for most parts of the garden and a woodchipper to turn fruit tree trimmings into mulch. We encourage ground-cover and currently plant forage crops such as sweet vetch that is used to feed Danny’s livestock in the community commonage project. The manure returns to our plot and is added to the compost heap.

Danny is the second outcome that I am proud of. Originally a farmworker, he started working with me almost 25 years ago.  When we met, he said “ek wil nie meer vir 'n plaasboer werk nie”. I said “ek soek nie 'n tuinwerker nie”.  We worked this out and now use a share-cropping model that looks something like the One Acre Fund in East Africa for two people.  Danny is now an accomplished small-scale farmer with access to his own land who sells in the village and surrounding small towns.  He recently told me that he put his children through school on the income that he generates from the land, and rarely buys vegetables or fruit.  In turn, I have been able to indulge in my interest in growing food while being able to maintain my career as a researcher. Further, I always have fresh ingredients to work with in my kitchen.  

Although Danny has 2 ha of land on the community project, he has limited water rights, and his soils are not yet in the same condition as our plot. On our one acre we grow around 70 food plants, including fruit and nut trees, and keep two ducks and some carp to keep the reservoirs clean.  For the last three years we reaped 1.7 tons of organically grown potatoes from a 600m² patch that we rotate around the garden. This is a quite respectable 28 tons/hectare.

This smallholder life is an important learning experience. I have learned the importance of a good relationship with my neighbours and other farmers in the area. Stephanie, my compost dealer being a good example. I learned the importance of having the right tools for cultivation and crop storage, and of knowing how to use them.  My secateurs are a cherished tool as is the hoe that I bought in the Transkei many years ago. As Danny said to me when I asked what advice I should give to a new Minister of Agriculture, “sê vir haar dat jy nie net met hierdie twee hande kan boer nie.”  I also learned that smallholders are a community and are embedded in communities.  These may comprise neighbours but are also virtual.  I receive advice on WhatsApp from Sheila, a former student, who farms with her family near Nairobi, and I am member of multiple social media groups that provide invaluable information.

It is a two-way flow. Having access to information and knowing how to learn is essential for a smallholder. Learning how to understand a soil test was an example.  Guidance from a colleague about agroecological options to legume inoculation was a good example that has resulted in three splendid pea harvests. Ndiko, my colleague, commented that I was the first person that he knows that applied his research on salinity and root systems. This produced a yield of 6kg of shelled peas from 9m² , around 6 tons/ha.  Learning from colleagues in computer science, I am also increasingly using AI’s capacity for summarising, synthesising and knowledge translation to improve our activities.

We have also bought our research to McGregor, sometimes in surprising ways.  In addition to linking the local kleinboervereniging to training opportunities at Elsenberg, holding a workshop on responsible wild food usage and cultivation (the local soutslaai/mesembryanthemum crystallinum is excellent), giving a talk on the South African food system to the local gardening club, we brought poets from the Cape Flats and other small villages to the 2017 McGregor Poetry Festival.  This was part of a project led by our sister centre in Critical Food Studies at UWC. The poets used themes of food, eating and hunger in their work.  Jolyn Phillip’s moving ‘The Fish System’ remains one of my favourites. 

Living in a rural community such as the Breede Valley for over 30 years has permitted me to witness important changes.  Some are distressing such as the replacement of grape-pickers with mechanical pickers, drastically reducing work opportunities during the harvesting season. Responses to new economic opportunities can be another, with hectares of open land converted to Citrus Undercover Production Systems.  However, the diversification of crops in this area is positive.  Farms that use to only produce wine or table grapes now grow a wide range of crops including butternut, figs, kiwi fruit, pomegranate, persimmon, dragon fruit, almonds, olives, melon, onion and onion seed, and herbs.  Some farmer’s markets have been established catering to higher income groups, but our Learning Journeys conducted with the SA Food Lab found that fresh produce is readily available in low-income areas sold by street traders and spaza shops. Sadly, what I have not seen is growth in the number of black farmers such as Danny. But a positive note, I recently noted the farming activities of migrants from other parts of South Africa and elsewhere in Africa who are growing vegetables and raising small and large stock on the periphery of towns such as Worcester.

Going forward, I think that food researchers should focus on the link between rural and urban areas and the role that can be played by small towns and secondary cities.  This could unlock the potential of linking human settlement with all aspects of the food system and improving the integration of town and countryside.  I think that the habitability of South African towns and cities can be improved through approaches such as the agroecological urbanism that we are attempting in McGregor. I also think that researchers must work more often in inter-disciplinary teams that bring together the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. As I have shown, my understanding of the food system has benefited through interactions with molecular biologists, computer scientists, human rights lawyers, and architects.

As for farmers, climate change compels them to focus on regenerative solutions to the environmental problems that have been produced by industrial agriculture.  Adapting to a world that will be hotter, drier and less predictable will require different ways of production. As with my own tiny plot, precision irrigation and reducing water waste are examples, while preserving and building soil health is essential..