Wine estate sows land reform seeds

 The Spier estate and Stellenbosch municipality have forged an innovative deal that gives the landless access to farms

Wine tycoon and philanthropist Adrian Enthoven and subsistence vegetable farmer Peter Stone have about as much in common as champagne and diesel oil.

Enthoven is a member of one of SA’s wealthiest families and owner of Spier, one of the country’s award-winning wine estates near Stellenbosch, while Stone is a hands-on farmer with dirt under his nails.

But now the two men are unlikely neighbours — thanks to a major land deal in the winelands, the first of its kind and potentially a model for future projects countrywide.

Rather than tilling Enthoven’s soil — as Stone did for several years — the straight-talking boer from Jamestown, outside Stellenbosch, is now one of 13 farmers to be allocated a lease on a 5ha allotment on a hilltop portion of municipal common land.

The deal is about to be formalised, with the Stellenbosch municipality — which owns the land — expected to grant final approval this month.

Spier previously leased the 65ha of municipal land from Stellenbosch council, but gave up the lease in 2003 and assisted the farmers by paying their rental and water charges of R150000 a year. Spier also donated tools and equipment to get the farmers started.

The municipality recently agreed to reduce the rental and to support a R10-million infrastructure upgrade project financed by the national Department of Land Affairs.

The subsistence farmers, who formed a collective, the Stellenbosch Small Farm Holdings Trust, grow everything from fancy lettuce to organic strawberries.

Escorting the Sunday Times around his land this week, Stone said: “For eight years we struggled. We’ve learnt a lot. We proved to them (the council and Spier) that we could survive.”

The small-scale farmers, mainly farm labourers, spent the years leading up to the deal working land belonging to Spier.

Although Enthoven this week chose to stay out of the limelight, his colleagues highlighted his role as crucial to the project’s success.

Spier’s sustainability director, Tanner Methvin, said: “Adrian’s role is not one of passive acceptance of these initiatives, but very much an enthusiastic driver of these initiatives. For him land reform has always been very important and he has always wanted to make sure that Spier is playing a meaningful role in the land reform movement in Stellenbosch.”

But the subsistence farmers would still be picking other people’s grapes if it wasn’t for years of behind-the-scenes work by a large team of lawyers and town planners, including Stellenbosch mayor Patrick Swartz, who said more land would be made available.

Swartz said: “It is one of my major programmes in my term to make more land available to previously disadvantaged people.

“By us looking at using the land resources we have, we are actually killing two birds with one stone, alleviating poverty and unemployment and at the same time addressing the issue of a balance in land ownership (between black and white).”

The Stellenbosch municipality is the seventh-richest non-metropolitan municipality in the country — one of the reasons being its considerable commonage land holdings of 1700ha, worth in the vicinity of R1.5-billion. Much of the land is tied up in commercial farm leases similar to the one Spier held.

Land reform experts this week said the project was testimony to what could be achieved if stakeholders pooled their resources.

The land transfer was so unusual that policymakers had to come up with brand-new policy frameworks. One of the project leaders, Professor Mark Swilling of Stellenbosch University, said: “We are making it up as we go along. Right in the middle of meetings we reinvent the story.”