Wild rooibos tea

The leaves and young shoots of the rooibos bush (Aspalathus linearis) have been used by indigenous peoples of the Western Cape since pre-history to produce a health-giving beverage known as rooibos tea. It was only in the early 1900s that the species began to be cultivated on a commercial basis.

The cultivated rooibos variety is fast-growing and high-yielding, but less resistant to pests and drought than wild varieties. Because of increasing demand, much of the species natural habitat has been plowed up and put under intensive mono-crop cultivation. There are very few areas remaining where wild tea plants can still be found in marginal and mountainous areas. Like the wild tea, small-scale "coloured" farmers were also limited to the more marginal areas by successive colonial and apartheid laws. Communities of small-scale rooibos farmers have been harvesting wild and cultivated rooibos for many generations, and have become the de facto guardians of the wild rooibos genetic stock.

LINKS:

To read the full article, download here.

EMG facilitated a programme of Action Research with small-farmers of the Heiveld Co-op and Wupperthal Co-op to identify, characterise and map populations of wild tea.

The knowledge built up in this action-research programme has been collected in the publication The Sustainable Harvest of Wild Rooibos, also available in Afrikaans hard-copy from EMG.

Farm restoration in Northern Cape in the spotlight

Scarred land: over a century of heavy farming has cut water erosion dongas into this treasured renosterveld hillside near Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape. Photo: Noel Oettle©

Catching the fall: a ‘check dam’ helps slow and spread the water which would otherwise cut this gully deeper, allowing soil to settle, seeds to germinate and plants to take root. Photo: Noel Oettle©

NIEUWOUDTVILLE: The scars run chest-deep in the grainy tillite clay on the renosterveld slopes of the Bokkeveld plateau, outside Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape. Their walls are hard as cement, baked solid by the sun since their topsoil has long since been carved away through the  scouring action of rain water. 

Some of these fissures are over a century old, slashed into the hillside by water erosion following overgrazing, the plough shear and failed contour lines where previous generations of farmers tried to stop tilled soils from washing away.

But now, just three years after erosion control measures were started by the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) at a demonstration site on the farm Avontuur, and the land is showing signs of recovery.

Tiny shrubs, succulents and flowering plants have started to bristle out of the sediment that’s been trapped by small ‘check dams’ made of poles, rocks and geotextile, a biodegradable hessian-like fabric.

Links:

Full article available here.

For more information on the Avontuur Sustainable Agriculture, visit http://avontuur.org.za or contact EMG at 027 218 1117.