NEWSLETTER 3. January 2012. (click here)
It has been a very hot summer which of course suites the Pecan very nicely. Rain has been patchy and we have not had much relative to some areas close by or the monthly average. Having said that though, the countryside is looking splendid and so are the developing fruits on the trees as can be seen from the “Newsletter 3″.
Factory manager George Buffel checks and counts the boxes into mini containers at the cold store on Ramah. The 10kg boxes are labelled according to EU Certified Organic specs and will go by road to Cape Town where they are cross-loaded into a single 20′ container for direct shipment to Rhumveld Winter & Konijn B.V., in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
This is the first time Roux Pecans sends a 20′ container of kernel to a single destination.
Roux Pecans and Rhumveld have a very close relationship and we are looking forward to expanding and cementing the co-operation.
We have been supplying Rhumveld for many years now and we know that regular customers are looking forward to the goods arriving.
George and his team do and excellent job and can justly be proud of the achievement.
The system holding the pipes in the water has been changed for a few reasons.
The first and most fortuitous is the fact that the old float above the suction sieves came loose and was washed away at the end of the flood. The system served me well but the most obvious drawback was the fact that blockages were difficult to detect and also the only person that can clean them is me. Being the only swimmer on the farm has drawbacks.
So, changing it to a system that has the floats UNDER the pipes makes with a stainless steel cage around the suction area kakes reed build-up easier to see, and of course anybody can go down the pipes and clean the outside of the cage with a broom.
The old system also had more of the pipe submerged and susceptible to rust.
The difference can be seen from the two pictures. So can the level of the river be compared!!!
Tree removal is one of the most emtionally difficult things to do.
In the first instance there is nothing ostensably “wrong” with the trees that are marked for removal. Secondly, these are the trees that have fed,clothed and educated my family for the past 20 years. And, lets not forget that it does not end there. The wages that are paid come from these trees. The profits made by the wholesaler or retailer we sell to comes from them.
In the final analysis it is about sunlight management as a function in the production of fruit. It is useful here to quote Prof. Bruce Woods from Georgia, USA: “Because pecans’ survival strategy has been partially driven by intense competition by neighbours in a heavily forrested river bottom habitat, competition for sunlight has emerged as a frimary factor associated with ‘fitness’.
The orchard manager is therefore challenged to identify strategies that maximize interception and utilization of sunlight.
Leaves use carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil to produce hydrates of carbon that form the energy sources required to sustain life. While mineral nutriens such as N, P, K, Zn etc, are critical to this process, they are rarely as limiting as is sunlight (i.e., photons).
It should be noted that by the time the solar beam of light penetrates about 1.5 – 2m of foliar canopy, essentially all of the useful photons (i.e., the ones vibrating in the blue and red regions) have been absorbed.”
Therein lies the rub. While the trees are still producing nuts, the quality becomes likely to decrease, and the lower limbs being shaded, die back. One is left with a tree struggling against its’ neighbours for the most sought after life component, sunlight, the the detrement of each other collectively. Also, bearing becomes one dimentional at the top or canopy of the tree rather than over the entire tree shape. The orchard manager is left with one of two options when the trees compete too much for sunlight. 1. Remove alternate trees or, 2. Mechanically cut the branches of all the trees to the scale that what remains does not compete with the neighbouring trees in the block..
I have decided to go the rout of the former option.
These two pictures show the block designated for tree removal before and after. We did it now because the nuts on the trees can be collected from the shucks when the branches are on the ground. The chipper was put to good use and the branches chipped onto the orchard floor.
And so goes the cycle of life. The nutrients borrowed from the ground in the growth and life-cycle of the trees will be returned to the soil in the form of compost resulting from the breakdown of the chips, leaves and shells. Only the kernel will return to the soil in some other place.
In May 2007 I wrote a blog entry about caracal (lynx / rooikat) and monkeys as an integrated management tool in the orchard.
Well, in 2010 we lost every lamb born to either Rift Valley Fever or the Caracal(s). This situation cannot really be tolerated indefinately as old age and a lack of income eminating from the flock of sheep is not sustainable.
At that time I was aware of Anatolian sheep dogs and the apparant success some farmers had with them in limiting losses to predators. In particular a breeding program called “Cheetah Outreach” ( www.cheetah.co.za ).
After the losses last year I decided to give it one more crack before “doing something about it”.
Well, the Lynx got the better of every lamb about a week after birth and in desperation I contacted Cheetah Outreach and the ball started gathering momentum. I contacted Roy and Jenny Heidenrich at their Anatolian breeding establishment is the mountains near Jansenville and they had no young dog available.
Roy mentioned that he had an older dog that was prepared to sell to me and I grabbed the opportunity. On Sunday past Sandy and I drove 1600km to fetch “Shelly”.
What an incredible experience this past week has been.
Firstly I had to reprogram they way my mind percieved this dog. It is in fact a dog with a sheep’s brain or, a sheep, that looks like a dog.
On arriving late afternoon she went straight off the Land Rover toward the sheep who fled. She casually followed and they settled. Since then, she has slowly gone from one group to the next, checking them and spending the day lying down near them. Gradually she gathers groups together.
Yesterday she had all the ewes with lambs in one group and the other ewes nearby.
She has a self feeder and that is just about it. I have checked her for ticks and rubbed her ears once since she is here. I drive past her and she gives me an uninterested glance before focusing on the sheep again.
It is early yet but, I have not lost a lamb since she is here. I suspect that her presence will be tested by the Caracal at some point but until now, it has decided discretion is the best option.
This has to be the most interesting farming thing that has happened to me in ages and I’m sure to have Shelly in the blog again soon. Integrating all these benign activities into a farming operation for positive results is incredibly satisfying.
I have a lot to learn about and from Shelly.
The crop of 2010 is sold out and we are very appreciative of all our customers and in particular the return customers. We had an excellent crop in 2010 both in terms of size and quality. It was a record harvest. This year the volume will be down but, we expect a good crop. The quality is superb again and the trees will be in a good position to store reserves before the leaf drop.
The leaves are just beginning to turn colour now since we had our first frost last week.
Orchard floor preparation has been done by slashing.
Low hanging branches are being pruned off in the first stage of adult tree pruning management and the branches can be seen in the rows between the trees. These get chipped just before the harvest is collected in the rows.
The schucks in which the nut is held have split but the nuts are not really ready to drop out. This is a good time to do this branch pruning and we remove the nuts at the same time. The moisture content of the kernel is still high (about 25%) and we keep the nuts in crates to continue the air drying process until they are at 6% moisture
. The green shucks around these Wichita nuts have split, and Stefans Louw Will prune these branches off and remove the nuts. Dried shucks from 2010 harvest can be seen at the top left of th
e picture.>
These Wichita in the crate are really looking 1st Class and is a good indication of what we can expect.
Pre-Harvest Weather: 2010/11 has been an unusual year. In the first half of the summer all indications pointed to prolonged drought. The second half was all about floods and rain. In fact, our pumps have not yet been lowered to “normal” river level. In the past 5 days we have had 50mm again.
For Roux Pecans it has all been good. Without the rain we would have been irrigating and using electricity. We turned the motors off a month ago! The river came as high as is expected in a 1 in 50 year flood and did not affect the orchard at all. Even the number of humid days we had saw no incidence of scab.
Cropping: We expect to begin harvesting in earnest the 1st week in June. By this time leaf drop will have set in and the last nuts in the cluster will be ready to fall.
Until then we are pruning and on Monday 16th a professional tree feller will arrive to remove alternate trees in a block 25 years old. We will harvest those nuts as the trees come down.
I have been watching with interest the Egyptians and Libyans in particular fighting to overthrow their democratically elected dictators with some interest.
C.L.M.Roux, my grandfather came to Ramah in 1925 and married. In 1940 he decided to leave his wife and two children on the farm and join the South African volunteer army to fight outside the borders of the country against a system and dictatorship that threatened everything he and his family stood for. He was 38 years old. (click the photos for details)
He was the only volunteer in a 100km radius of the farm. I shudder to think of the mental anguish they must have gone through as a little family unit. His children were sent to boarding school in Bloemfontein 250km from the farm leaving my grandmother alone on the land to maintain their economic future while he was away.
I remember him explaining what the desert looked like and their life in it. He fought up and down the same road we see on the news.I have his diaries he kept which had to be hidden in the lining of his helmet as it was illegal to keep one. He hid his camera and took a spool of photos.
It is facinating to read those diaries and letters home explaining the 1000′s of rounds they sometimes discharged from their 25pdr artillery guns. He and his gun crew were involved in two rear-guard actions. One at Bir Hakiem when backing the Free French and another on the retreat back to El Alemein. Neither occasion were they expected to survive. He was no military hero but in my book the sacrifice he made and was prepared to make makes him wonderful, to me.
How hard it must have been for him to see the Nazi sympathetic National Party win the election in South Africa in 1948 and plunge us into that infamous period of our history.
Democracy and freedom are not to be taken lightly or entrusted to fools to abuse. The consequences are dire. Zimbabwe is expecting elections soon, apparantly as a show of democracy. South Africa too is having elections soon.
We must look back, not to repeat mistakes going forward. Maybe even, we should look around to see what we have allowed.
We had our own commercial nursery at the orchard which is now abandoned but there are quite a lot of grafted trees in this dense forest of what now is an almost inpenetrable pecan mass.
I decided to get the grafted trees out and transplant them. They are about 70mm thick and the limbs had to be removed. It was very much a “speculative transplanting” in September of 2010. This is late, they are older trees and because the tap root had very few side roots I gave them very little chance of success.
The sister of my Godson from Switzerland visits us from time to time and she did an excellent job as temporary hole digger!
This is the tree planted in the spot she made the hole. I am very encouraged with the result of the transplanting. The flood line can be seen in the picture and the river is still quite high by comparison.
This is not a Land Rover advertisement even though it is a new addition to the farm. We are mowing the orchard now and may have to do so again just before the harvest – in the other direction. The volume of grass this summer is considerably more than before because of the climate we have had over the past few months. Very much more organic material to rot in and fertilize the soil.
Isn’t it uncanny that no sooner one makes a statement or prediction one is proved completely wrong!
On the 3rd of December 2010 I made the observation that we may be entering a drought cycle. It appears that that statement was premature – to say the least!
As the new year began it started raining and we had our annual expected rainfall plus about 60mm in January alone. The graph supplied by our Department of Water Affairs shows the state of the river at the Van Der Kloof Dam which is about 60km upstream of Ramah.
Have a look at the “normal” release from the dam viz about 200 -300 Q(m.sq).
(click the graph and pictures for an enlargement)
The river level rose up the bank and finally into the pump station at the second unexpected peak outflow at the end of January.
We were caught by surprise by the first spike and many farmers lost motors and pumping equipment. There was some loss of life too in our vacinity sad as that is.
Fortunately we have a high, steep bank and we could lift the pumps and motors on the rails up the bank as the water rose. The final spike came on a Saturday night and the two 11Kw motors were flooded and had to be re-wired.
Soon after this spike, the level dropped about 1.5m and the saturated bank slipped about 1.5 cm just below the pump site. This caused the whole system to move and something had to give. The first “big” KSB pump made of cast iron proved to be it and it snapped. This was the biggest expense and an engineering fault in the initial design was the reason.
I had a welding specialist cut the main pipe and insert a rubber flexi-sleeve to prevent this happening again.
This picture shows the river level when the pumps have been pulled up the bank once already. Each time the level rises to the trolley, the pipe is unbolted and the frame is pulled up the bank to the next flange. Two flanges can be seen above this take-off. So, even if the river rises we can still pump.
Surprise surprise! We had to lift it to the highest 4th flange and the water still got us!
This gives some idea of the water volume. A reed raft can be seen going by. The motors in the picture were under the water at the high mark!!
As for the effect on the pecan crop I can only find positives – pumps, motors and slipping banks besides.
We did not have to run the motors for a month. Quite a saving.
The land is saturated.
The underground waters are overflowing and our fountains are flowing freely still. Some areas of the farm are still swampy and the grazing is magnificent as can be seen from the view below.
As a young schoolboy in the 1960′s I clearly remember the droughts my father and grand father were farming through and the discussions on strategies best to get through the seemingly annual events.
I remember my grandfather arriving home with a LDV load of springbok bones to sell to the skin and bone buyers. I remember coming home for holidays and being sent to the windmill watering holes with a bale or two of scarce lucerne to put down for the springbok and them not even moving away when we drove through them or had to physically help them walk. If they were lying down and you helped them up, the next day you found that animal dead. Too weak to survive. I remember pumping restrictions from the Orange and Vaal Rivers.
We have a photo of one of Sir Donald Campbell’s “lieutenants” Capt. Cook holding my aunt as a baby after he had landed near our homestead in his Sopwith Camel when he criss-crossed South Africa from salt pan to salt pan looking for a suitable one for a land speed record attempt site. Finally he found Verneuk Pan near Prieska some 250km from here. He could land a plane here because there were no trees. This was 1929. My grandmother May, is second from left. (click file 0001 below)
We have photos of the countryside and homestead with not a tree in sight and the more recent photos such as the one above which show the millions of trees there are now. Most of them under 15 years old. There are now so many thorn trees that we are seriously viewing them as a pest and considering chipping them for compost. Have a look at the file 0001 below with three photos. The first is the Sopwith Camel in the veld. The second is Ramah hill in aproximately 1960 from the British fort and, the third is a similar view in 1991.
The reason(s) for such a population explosion are intriguing. The question is “WHY?”
Equally intriguing is that I have noticed that a huge number, if not the majority of them under the age of about 8 years have not survived the winter of 2010 well. There are still no new buds even though we have had above average rain for November. The question is “WHY?”
I have some pet theories to both questions.
Regarding the former:
1. My great grandfather was swept along with the rush to the new diamond rush culminating in the dry diggings at Kimberley at the end of the 19th centuary. His uncles (Marais Bros.) were pariculary successfull and one of the activities in a portfolio of successful ventures outside of mining was cutting wood on the land they owned around Kimberley to fuel the fires – literally, for domestic and commercial use. He said that there was not a tree left standing in a 100 mile (160 km) circumference. His job was doing this.
Ramah is just at the limit of that range and it may be that it has taken a centuary for the trees to gradually grow back and for the seed density to reach a level where there is now more germination as a consequence of there being more seed bearing adult trees.
2. Many farmers have switched from farming sheep to game/wildlife farming. It may be that since this conversion started in earnest in the early 1990′s that game is not so hard on germinating seedling thorn trees and thus a higher rate of survival making them about 15 to 20 years old now.
3. My pet theory, that acacia thorn trees being legumes are CO2 consumers and with a measurable rise in atmospheric CO2 in the recent past, survival of seedlings is assisted by this means.
4. The average annual rainfall from 1930 to 1965 on this farm was 11 inches. (250mm) From 1930 to 2010 the average is 12 inches (275mm) per annum. We have been in a “wet cycle” to cause a shift up in ave. rainfall over such a relatively short time.
5. It may well be a combination of all four and more reasons.
With regard the latter question:
1. We have had less than the monthly average rainfall every month since February this year.
2. We had a particulary cold snap (-9C) for a few consecutive days in June. Usually we go this low once or twice a year for a day at a time. Even Eucalyptus trees show signs of leaf scorch as high as 15m above the ground.
3. These two factors in combination have in my view, hammered the young acacias.
I feel that we are seeing the end of a 15 – 20 year “wet” cycle and entering the “dry” cycle that may return the average annual rainfall to 11 inches (225mm) per annum.
Dinner party talk will assume global warming as the reason. I’m sure it plays a role and may exacerbate the drought cycle but, the Karoo has been “here” before.
Start thinking drought strategies – all us lucky farmers that have seen the best part of our productive agricultural life in good climatic conditions by and large.