Steph and Rob from Veldt Reared

Tell us a little about yourself!

I (Steph) grew up in the Eastern Freestate farming town of Harrismith and went to Port Elizabeth to study. I studied fine art and ended up going into graphic design, then the printing industry. We moved to the Western Cape and now I am the farmer, as was always in my heart. We’re closer to nature, with animals galore, a veggie garden and ground under my bare feet.

I love growing our own veg, bugs and all! I love succulents and have a vast collection of indigenous succulents. Also some smaller collections of different stapelias - this love has been passed down from my grandmother. I also have a dairy cow - because getting raw milk was such a pain (because that's what you do… haha) I have mastered churning butter, ice-cream, yogurt, cream cheese and a farmer's cheese - still learning! To add to the collection of chickens we have, I started to breed heritage chickens! Yes there will be Easter Egger POL (point of lays) available soon for everyone to have a colourful basket of eggs! 

Rob was born in Zambia and matriculated at Potchboys High. After school he went into the poultry industry at 19 and has been in all the different areas of the commercial chicken industry from hatcheries, laying and breeding  farms to growing broilers. He started his own hatchery selling Day Old Broiler Chicks in Eastern and Western Cape. Rob is also an amateur Classic Race Car competitor…

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

After being in the poultry industry for many years, I (Rob) just thought there must be a more natural way…. Chickens didn't always live in chicken houses…

Watching an episode of Kwela about Farmer Angus on Spier many years ago sparked my interest. Angus was asked how he knew chickens had been on a specific piece of grass, and he proceeded to pick a blade and compare it to the nearby grass, and  it was much bigger. Seeing the difference in the pasture clearly illustrated the benefit of this type of farming. - ‘money for nothing and your chicks for free’.  This led to conversations with people about pesticides and chemicals in food. It made us think of all the health impacts of a “normal” diet- cancer and other terminal illnesses- and that led us to the pursuit of a different and more sensible approach to farming and ultimately food consumption 

So the time came and it was a choice of either sailing the world or buying a farm and farming in this way.

Steph fell pregnant and that made our choice for us! We started to think about how we were going to grow pastured chickens! Staying in Somerset West at the time, we negotiated to start out on Lourensford farm, on the foothills of the Helderberg Mountains. We soon realised that we needed to be closer to our farming activities so that we could quickly respond to the needs of our chickens, which wasn’t possible at Lourensford. The chickens also needed to travel too far to the abattoir, which wasn’t what we stood for.

So we found the farm we now own in Wolseley. It’s located just outside Wolseley, where we can build our dream, and where we can easily check on the chickens. Business, homestead and the perfect place for a little girl to grow up at!

While broiler/meat chickens are our core business, we started to add animals to the system to help regenerate the soil and diversify. We got sheep initially to mow the grass on the farm from years of neglect. A year or so later we got a Nguni bull and cow to add some good manure to the system. We also added a Guernsey cow, now with a calf -Clara Belle to our eco system.

We wanted some pigs to use as natural tillers to clear some land of native shrubs ahead of the chicken mobiles, well Rob went to get 10 piglets and came back with 34! Because it was a good deal! So here we grew 34 pigs, we kept the sows to breed them and now we have 74 piglets. So we will have some pastured pork available in a few months. 

After 4 years and many people asking for eggs we now do some pastured eggs too. Our hens walk around and eat whatever they find, including fully non-GMO feed and black soldier fly larvae daily.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

Firstly and mostly we built a business from purely from an idea.
There are a few more things like seeing the changes in the soil and landscape where the chicken mobiles move over from start to now, thriving. To get feedback on how people love our chicken and especially people with medical conditions that can’t have many meat options BUT ours is sometimes the only one they can have by being so clean and free of nasties.

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

It is such a unique space that we operate in that there was not much advice on how to grow chickens this way. Youtube helped a lot to figure out the basics. We had to figure out how to make chicken mobiles (we are on design 3, and we love it), how to package and brand our chicken, how these ‘pasture chickens’ grow— and we had to face our first winter! 

By always being compared to free range chicken was difficult and got us despondent, but encouragement from JP Bolus from SANS saying “just keep doing what you doing”. Jess from FoodClubHub said to stick to our beliefs. Angus said the same, a man we view as the true pioneer of regenerative agriculture in SA.

Here we are, 4 years later, educating people why pastured chicken is better than free range BUT we have carved a market and name for ourselves and we growing, slowly and organically. We have always believed that our  process is dynamic and how we grow chickens today will not be the same in a year's time. We are constantly looking for ways to reduce grains, chickens are omnivores so the popular ‘veggie diet’ concept is not one we subscribe to. 

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

This way of farming is cult like- you either believe it or you don’t!

Where do you see growing going in South Africa? 

We see it as a limited niche market. And our growth is slow (and strong), relying mainly on word of mouth. And sometimes get a bit pessimistic as we see all the falsely labeled products out there that compete with our sector, whereas  we actually do what we say on our labels. There is a need for a certification, as we don't want the labelling to be just a marketing term,

We want and need an abattoir, where we can control the whole process from hatching to slaughter. We then control the whole quality process too. This would mean we would be able to expand our footprint in the Western Cape and SA.