Only around 7% of businesses make it to thirty years, Abs van Rooyen remarked at the gala dinner celebrating three decades since he took over a small banana tissue lab, run from a farm house garage in Letsitele, a town on the banks of the Letaba River which had its start only in the fifties because of malaria.
Van Rooyen is perhaps better known in the industry as the Letsitele-born nurseryman who spotted the potential of the Nadorcott cultivar, realised within the eponymous ANB Investments, owner of the ClemenGold brand.
Suné Wiltshire, Du Roi Laboratory general manager, with Jane Ramothwala and Anne Davson, retired laboratory management receiving lifetime achievement awards (photo: Anne-Hélène Meyer)
At that point, Van Rooyen told the audience, there were four banana labs in the country competing fiercely and he'd heard that yet another one was soon to be founded by Anne Davson, while he was looking for a manager of the small facility producing only 650,000 banana plants per year by that stage.
"One of my best moves in life was to get Anne involved in 1994," he said and under her and laboratory manager of many years Jane Ramothwala, sales of banana plantlets "skyrocket[ed] in eighteen months to 1.6 million plants," noted Suné Wiltshire, current Du Roi Laboratory general manager.
Du Roi Laboratory sales and technical manager Tam Johnson and Suné Wiltshire, general manager
Today, Du Roi Laboratory has the capacity to produce over eight million banana plants annually and it has the support of the greater Du Roi group of nurseries and ANB Investments, positioning them at the forefront of technological advancements and research, Wiltshire said.
Attending the Du Roi annual banana workshop: representing United Plantations in Eswatini are Joshua Brown, Howard Zungu and Errol Shongwe
"The banana customer is a very special one"
Among laboratory employees, 98% are women, some working here since before 1994. Van Rooyen noted that much of Davson and Ramothwala's success lay in incorporating their aspirations and requirements into the workplace. For their role in bringing the lab to its thirty year mark, they were awarded lifetime achievement recognition.
Alan Davson, lauded for his uncanny ability to remember the names and familial particulars of clients as well as for his canny prowess as a pilot, joined in 1996. He was, Du Roi Laboratory sales and technical manager Tam Johnson said, instrumental in opening many new markets for Du Roi Laboratory that have become key to their success.
Martin Simumba, Tawanda Rukuni and Farai Kanyeredza from Ilanzi River Estate, growing banana, citrus, avocados and macadamias at the confluence of the Zambezi and Kafue rivers in Zambia
"The banana customer is a very special one, it's some of the most organized people that you can have," Van Rooyen remarked. "You've got to plant at the right time, you've got to do your sucker selection at the right time, and then you get the harvest fairly well-predicted, except in subtropical areas where you often cold or extremely hot conditions."
Dumisa Sikhondze from Nisela Farms in Eswatini, Zwelithini Dlamini from United Plantations in Eswatini, Innocent Zwane from Nisela Farms with Dr Johan van der Waals of RealIPM
Annual Du Roi banana workshop
Another coup for Du Roi Laboratory was the appointment of the former director of tropical crops at the Agricultural Research Council in Nelspruit Dr John Robinson where he made many new banana selections through the natural process of somaclonal variation, many of them "groundbreaking", Wiltshire noted, and today offered commercially by Du Roi Laboratory along with the Cavendish and Williams varieties.
Franco Hoogenhout and Altus Bantjes from Farmers Trust agency at the Tshwane fresh produce market
Dr Robinson developed pest and disease and natural disaster protocols for banana growers which he freely distributed and they still consider, Wiltshire said, his books on banana cultivation as the gold standard on the topic.
Representing RealIPM at the banana workshop: Evan Scholtz, Dewald Kamffer, Nardus van der Walt and Elmien Coetser
Banana plantlet sales are complemented by production advice and infield consultation and the annual banana growers' technical workshop organised by Du Roi, which closely monitors, she added, developments in genome editing and promising new varieties on the horizon.
Banana bunchy top virus and genome editing were some of the topics under consideration at the workshop with keynote speakers from the Agricultural Research Council and the private sector.
Gavin Pirie, commercial manager of Du Roi Nursery and Anne-Hélène Meyer, general manager of Du Roi Nursery in Letsitele, in conversation with Bruce Milton of Royal Macadamia in Levubu 
For more information:
Du Roi Laboratory
Tel: +27 83 656 7805
Email: [email protected]
https://www.duroilab.co.za/en/