Raymond Auerbach Part 1: Farmer and trainer

My journey into farming began early. My dad, Dr. Franz Auerbach, was involved in the fight against apartheid. He did his master's on prejudice in South African history textbooks and his PhD on why black kids drop out of school. My mother, apart from being a feminist with a strong sense of justice, was also very much a gardener who'd grown up in rural areas - very pragmatic and less idealistic than dad in many ways.

By high school, I was already interested in agriculture. In 1969, I joined the Soil Association of South Africa and started my own little garden in our suburban home in Joburg. I met Lawrence Hills of the Henry Doubleday Association when he visited South Africa, and he took a shine to me and wrote letters of encouragement from Ryton Gardens In Coventry (I still have links with them today). Old man Rodale from the Rodale Institute inPennsylvania also wrote me very supportive letters, and I visited them with a graduate student when starting my own comparative research trials many years later.

I dropped out of school in my final year and completed my matric by correspondence in 1970. I briefly enrolled at university to study mathematics and philosophy, to bring together logic and reason, but after three months, I realized it wasn't for me. I told my philosophy tutor, "To be a philosopher, you have to step back from life and look at life. To be a student of philosophy, you have to step back one more step and look at those who are looking at life. I'm too young for that. I need to go and do some living first." She said, "Raymond, I think you're quite right. If we had the courage, we'd also leave." I thought, wow, I'm getting out just in time!

So from there I started to explore farming, with my garden and the Soil Association of South Africa (SASA), and then through more serious practical study first in Soweto with Marie Roux and later at Camphill Hermanus with Ingrid Adler.

International Training

I was determined not to tell people how to do things I hadn't tried myself. After a year's apprenticeship in biodynamic vegetable growing with Ingrid Adler at Camphill (in Hermanus, a farm for young people in need of special care, I went to Australia with help from Guy Wertheim-Aymes from 1973 to 1976.

My BioDynamic training there under Alexei de Podolinsky and Dr Andrew Sargood was comprehensive. I spent time learning soil and dairy science, then worked on a beef farm, worked six months with a Dutch vegetable farmer, spent 18 months on a dairy farm, then apple and pear farming for export, and then time on extensive BioDynamic grain, sheep, and cattle operations. The last six months I ran a garden at a school for mentally handicapped children.

I remember working with Frank, a deaf young man with fingers like logs who moved clumsily. I put him in charge of collecting eggs from the chickens. The staff thought I was crazy, but after breaking just one egg, his face showed such horror that he never broke another. He became incredibly careful with his chickens and eggs; farming can be the most powerful therapy! This experience taught me that human beings are an essential part of any farming system. You have to build your farming system around the people who are part of it.

Establishing My Own Farm

I returned to South Africa in 1977 absolutely full of myself, very much with the arrogance of youth. I knew all the answers to all the problems of Africa - or so I thought. I had to fall on my face quite hard before I realized I didn't know everything.

After some experience as farm manager on three farms, I ended up buying a farm in Kokstad with a very big overdraft, just as the 1982 drought hit. The community saved me. When I returned from visiting family, my hayshed was mysteriously full. Three neighboring farmers had delivered loads of hay on New Year’s Day. When I protested to my nearest neighbor that I couldn't pay for it, he simply said, "You just remember to do the same for some youngster when you're able to."

At that stage, I was also involved with the Kokstad Amateur Dramatic Society, and we put on the play “The Crucible” where I took the role of farmer John Proctor. This remarkable play is about narrow-minded spirituality, and was directed by Toni Maytham, mother of John Maytham.

I had a 75-hectare farm when the average in our dairy study group was over 1,000 hectares. They were milking about 1,000 cows; I was milking 36. But I was retailing my milk and focused on building up the soil, using manure to fertilize, and planting diverse fodder crops.

Within three years, I'd gone from buying almost all my feed to being nearly self-sufficient. Despite being just 7% of the size of the average farm in the study group, we were generating 26% of the net farm income. Two years later, during continued drought, the average farmer was making a loss, while I was still profitable. The economist said, "Raymond, when I do the average figures for the study group, I have to leave you out because you're such an outlier." The other farmers said I was profitable only because I retailed my milk, but the per-hectare and per-cow efficiency figures showed I was simply more efficient. They couldn't understand it.

I recently presented these comparative figures as the keynote address for the First International Conference on Organic Agriculture in Drylands and Deserts held at Byannur in Inner Mongolia, showing how dairy farming changed from primary production a hundred years ago to a modern situation where industrial dairy farms have become input processors, and cows have become units of production rather than animals with a personality.

The Rainman System and Water Management

Water management has always fascinated me. As a child, they called me "the water baby" – as I grew up, I became "the rainman." This interest led me to establish the Rainman Landcare Foundation, focusing on sustainable water harvesting techniques.

I developed what came to be known as the "Rainman rainwater harvesting system”, which used crop rotation, compost, mulch, swales and vetiver grass. A swale is essentially a level ditch dug along the contour of the land. We would plant vetiver grass along the crests of these swales. When heavy rain falls, the swale slows the water down, and if it overtops, the water filters through the vetiver, which prevents erosion and captures silt on the upslope side.

It creates a self-terracing effect. This happened within two years on our farm and has continued since; one can also cut the Vetiver grass and use it as a mulch. Many of those swales that I set up on community gardens are still functioning effectively 30-40 years later.

Personal Life Intertwined with Farming

In 1984, Christina entered my life. She was a nurse and midwife from England who had also worked with organic farms. She arrived as a traveler, interested in my farm. Seven days after meeting her, I proposed, saying, "If you marry me, you also marry South Africa, and it's not going to be easy to bring up kids here." After a trip to the Wild Coast, she said yes. My parents were relieved - finally, a reasonable young woman with professional training! 

Christina transformed the farm. Suddenly there was another pair of hands and another creative mind with ideas about bigger vegetable gardens and new approaches. She became secretary of Kokstad Home Industries and learned preserving techniques from local farmers, and soon the farm kitchen was transformed into a food processing centre, with jams, pickles, preserves and ferments!.

The local community was baffled: "What does this cosmopolitan woman see in this small, dirt-poor farmer?" But we thrived together. On our wedding night, we conceived twins, and Jessica and Rupert were born 11 months after we first met; marry a midwife, you get instant family planning! Little Elinor arrived nearly five years later. Today, they are all married professionals, and at the last count we have six grandchildren! The twins will celebrate their fortieth birthday next week!

The Biodynamic Influence

My approach to farming was deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner's philosophy. Steiner integrated the physical, social, and spiritual realms in his worldview. Biodynamic agriculture—literally meaning "life force farming"—differs from conventional organic farming in its appreciation of these life forces.

This manifests practically in developing what we call a "farm organism." That's where the word "organic" actually comes from—not from organic chemistry related to carbon, but from the concept that a farm should be an artistic blend of rocks, minerals, soil, plants (both annual and perennial), animals, and humans. When understood properly, the farm itself becomes a balanced organism.

Learning from Farmers: The Donkey Farmer Story

One of the most important lessons came from Robert Mazibuko in Edendale in 1977. It was the height of Grand Apartheid, and there I was, a young white oke in the middle of Edendale working with Ferdi Engel, a coloured oke, and Baldwin Mbatho, a black oke. The three of us were like brothers under this father, Robert Mazibuko.

Bab Mazibuko told me a story about a donkey farmer that changed how I approached agricultural extension. He said, "The trouble with extension people is they tend to have great confidence in their own authority, but they often don't understand the implications of their advice and their attitude."

He described how a traditional extension officer might visit a small farm with 30 donkeys on overgrazed land and immediately say, "You have to get rid of these donkeys! They're ruining the grass!" The farmer smiles politely, agrees, but later tells his wife, "This guy has no idea what he's talking about. If he comes back, tell him I'm out." You've closed his heart because you haven't respected what he's doing.

The better approach is to arrive and say, "I see you're interested in donkeys. Let's look at which are the best ones." You start with him where he is. Maybe you suggest taking the best jack and jenny as a breeding pair, fencing half the farm, putting those two on one side and the others on the other. If he does that, you're bringing in a little management. Later, you might suggest adding a cow where grass is recovering.

The difference between arrogantly telling someone what they're doing wrong and sympathetically listening for the best in what they're actually doing is chalk and cheese.