"I have green fingers and it calms me to work with plants," says Roedolf van der Merwe, entrepreneur and founder of Eat Your Greens. He is a supplier of "a little bit of everything" grown on several small, rented Gauteng locations and now also on his own farm in Brits, Northwest Province. For the latter he has ordered variegated Australian finger lime saplings, Kinsei tangerines, banana trees, passion fruit, and even apples and pears.
He has his reasons: "We sell the leaves and blooms of apples and pears – chefs ask for it. We have to start looking at fruit because the vegetable price is just too unstable and the market is so competitive. I realised we can grow it all ourselves, and we're actually very successful because of the temperatures on our farms."
Eat Your Greens does the finicky things like pumpkin flowers, Thai lime and curry leaves, and many herbs: catnip, pineapple sage, blue sage, tea tree, chamomile.
Roedolf van der Merwe, owner of Eat Your Greens, with Khoza Mokhako, senior manager.
Van der Merwe is always open to new lines: when he heard that a retailer was looking for celeriac, he decided to plant more of that. He's already growing hops, and winter barley seems an interesting crop with soil aeration benefits. And then there is asparagus: he's always wanted to grow it since a trip to the eastern free State which was, so the belief ran, the only place in South Africa it could be grown. Recent plantings in wildly diverse locales are proving the opposite, and Van der Merwe is very keen to try it intercropped with the finger limes.
More lettuce suppliers exiting now than post-Covid
Three of his lettuce suppliers have recently left the business, he says, tired of the relentless hours and the slim margins: they're losing more suppliers now than after Covid. He points to lettuce plants they'll have to plough in, although they did plant extra lettuce to reduce risk, like the first-in-a-decade hailstorm they had on the Brits farm in April.
Right: freshly harvested parsley.
But the lettuce market is exceptionally quiet at the moment, he observes. He tells how their retail programme for Lollo Rosso, of which he was the only supplier in Gauteng, was ended because the line wasn't meeting the retailer's sales targets.
"The lettuce market right now is really dead. By August the lettuce market starts to pick up, when everyone wants to get into their bikini bodies, but right now people just want soup vegetables."
He remarks that they were very fortunate during the recent extraordinary cold over the interior of South Africa, apart from limited instances of black frost on young crops. "The cold did hold back the plants' growth and there are some shortages this week as a result of the sudden shock that plants experienced."
Exports growing quickly
Eat Your Greens supplies an array of baby and niche vegetables to the Belgian catering sector, to the UK's catering and restaurant sector and to Dubai and Doha. Most of their exports will enter The Netherlands for distribution across Europe.
"Exports have increased very quickly for us, and soon we'll be exporting our first Habañero chillies," he says. "We also export baby pak choy and longstem broccoli, baby cabbage. Baby butternut and baby gem squash are new export lines, this season."
Walking the chemical tightrope
Van der Merwe took his entire technical management team to a recent Gauteng suppliers' day, organized by retailer Woolworths, to introduce biological pest control companies to farmers.
The Woolworths' technical team is very concerned about resistance to pesticides developing and the impact of pesticides on the people working on farms, and believe they must play a role in helping farmers ease away from hazardous chemicals, especially organophosphates.
"When you bring in chemicals," Van der Merwe remarks, "you almost get to a point where you wonder: is it worth trying to get along without it? For instance, with weeds - we're having so many issues with weeds on so many of the farms."
The labour cost of manual weeding favourably compares to that of chemical weeding.
A herbicide with active ingredient Linuron, which they used to spray on carrot lands, is now among a long list of active ingredients banned in South Africa (four of the herbicides they used before are on this list). "The problem was that we would pick the chemical up in our MRLs all the time if we sprayed post-germination. After heavy rains, we'd pick it up downhill in other plants because it was translocating in the soil."
He wonders whether a resistance to what they've been spraying has developed, and then also chemicals have become so expensive, it costs almost more than hiring a team of workers to manually remove the weeds.
"The Woolworths training day was awesome. I've always wanted to farm more biologically, but it always seemed like a far-off idea. We really do not want to resort to chemicals," he declares, "I want to walk through my fields and be able to pick any leaf to eat."
For more information:
Roedolf van der Merwe
Eat Your Greens
Tel: +27 82 589 3003
Email: [email protected]