Kobus Meiring from Cape Town

Tell us a little about yourself!

I'm an Afrikaans boy that grew up in the city, went to Jan van Riebeeck in kloof street and studied economics and law at UCT. I work remotely in software from a rented cottage on a wine farm in Cape Town. I have around 300m2 of land under compost-only "natural farming" cultivation in different rented gardens spread around the Southern Suburbs and manage around a 100 households of food waste to produce the fertility for the gardens and prevent organics from going to landfill. Some of my gardens grow to sell to a deli, some are experiments in resilient polycultures (watering only once ever week or two even in summer), and home gardens to provide my own vegetables during summer season. I've been growing in pots for around 7 years, but this is only my second spring with dedicated garden bed space under irrigation and third year making compost.

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

I've loved playing around in the garden since I was a kid and had a pot-plant garden throughout my digs-livings during university. There was always a slow trend to more plants and more pots, but this got a big boost when I found the community food garden in the Oude Molen Eco Village in Pinelands in April 2023. Timelines lined up really well for me and I took a sabbatical from my legal software career to work in the garden full-time. It was an incredible time, spending all day making compost, tending to trees, creating garden beds and just generally caring for the space. It was the dream life but I didn't make any money for that period. I had to start working again so I rented an allotment in the food garden and have been expanding since then.

Spending the time in the community garden and gardening without money provided the amazing insight that with biology you can create your own "value". If I pruned the trees and made compost from the chippings, if I fed that compost back to the trees they would grow even faster which means I could make even more compost! Coming from an economics background steeped in the language of scarcity and supply and demand, this realization of biology's abundance felt like an absolute breakthrough. But this breakthrough still needed some follow-up because trees grow slowly and I needed more compost! I started coordinating with a organisation in Cape Town called "Gooi" that collects foodscraps from households to drop it off at my house and managed to get a strong supply of horse manure and pine shavings from stables nearby. This allowed me to start making a large amount of compost in the Berkeley Hot Composting method. Having a total abundance of compost got me looking around town for new spots to start growing and I expanded some gardens at home and got 3 more allotments at the eco village.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

I'm young enough for the effects of climate change to likely become very real in my lifetime. Living in a city and being dependent on systems that are part of the problem can be very demotivating and in most cases leads to an apathy. Becoming aware of the Paris agreement view that we could keep living with our population numbers if globally everyone only emitted two tons of carbon per year really got me thinking- It's not a problem of population, it's a problem of lifestyle.

I'm convinced by Buckminster Fuller that the only way to replace an existing system is to create a new one that makes the old one obsolete. In this vein I've been looking for ways that reduce a footprint but that are enjoyable in and of themselves. Looking at the compost area at Oude Molen and seeing that the floor has lifted around 30cm in biomass since I started there and considering all the food I've eaten that has been powered by what would have been landfill waste makes me so excited about life beyond the fact that it has a carbon impact.

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

Two bits, the first being "Make your own compost". I didn't comprehend at the time how important/helpful that advice was, but being aware of energy flows in a garden now feels like a primary consideration. If you are going to be taking "energy" out in the form of fruits and veg, you need to empower plants to put that energy back into the system by providing them with the nutrients they need to build their solar panels that change sun energy into chemical (sugars and carbs) energy that we use to feed ourselves.

The second is the no-dig approach to gardening. It's was primarily a very easy way to get into gardening (just plopping some cardboard and compost on top of almost anything and putting some plants in), but it also encouraged a very light touch to gardening that has definitely influenced my growing approach. I'm not aware of the fact that some digging in some cases might be productive in the long run, but went my first many garden beds growing very sucessfully with no-dig only. I think acknowledging that we can't understand the complexity of soil biology, and that on the whole, adding organic matter and water and getting out of the way is often the best thing we can do in a gardening context.

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

Two things, the first being that you don't need to own land to grow veg! I don't own any of the growing spaces I work at and it hasn't been a problem yet. It definitely adds a lighter touch where you have to do it for the process and not for the ownership of it.

The second is to always be experimenting. I've accidentally killed hundreds of plants in my life but have planted many many thousands . I've got beds that grow super "productive" market garden style lettuce with consistent irrigation, bed length, and planting spacing, but also some beds that are mostly perennials that I harvest pepino melons, sorghum, artichokes, and rosemary from. I've also found that almost all the "advice" (often feels like orders) I get from older people about what to do and how to do it has been mostly not the case (allelopathy has very little scientific evidence behind it, you can often plant muuuch dense than you'd think, you can garden entirely without the use of ANY products). So just try it out. Probably also to write down when you've planted what, but I still don't follow that well enough so unsure if I can advise that..

Where do you see growing going in South Africa? 

Since I realized that gardening can be "inflation-proof" when you (ideally) grow your own biomass or get free biomass from waste streams, I've been very optimistic that compost-based food-growing will become a very economically viable pursuit in the future. If the cost of inputs of commercial farms increase with price inflation, but there is no increase in the cost of compost-based gardens they will start out-competing industries that need to buy their fertility. In the city i'm imagining this in small-scale plots, and on a larger scale the Syntropic Agroforestry systems are very promising (specifically the work Scott Hall is doing to design a business plan to scale systems that grow their own fertility).

These systems are often called "Low Energy" systems because they create more energy output than they put in. Compared to industrial agriculture where the inputs require large amounts of energy to synthesise in laboratories and factories and need to be shipped to the farm every year just to create tons of corn that is then fed to sad cows that end up being some of the most energy-intensive(wasteful?) calories you can consume). I've also been very interested in modular productive systems where I'm trying to track the amount of compost, water, and infrastructure needed to install a system that can then be cared for with a fairly light touch. I am inspired in the longer run once I have a handle on these to start trying to implement them in public spaces to grow food for the public but also just to inspire people to grow their own food. An example i've been experimenting with is two bean teepees with a a-frame between them growing tomatoes and a ground-cover of cowpeas, sweet potatoes, and spinach. Irrigation for such a small system is also not expensive, but there are definitely still some technical hurdles I'm exploring, and always excited to chat to people about!

The "One Straw Revolution" by Masonobu Fokuoku (free online - https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta//onestraw.pdf) has been very inspiring in the approach towards human influence within ecology!