The Rooibos Farmer Who Bought Back the Farm He Used to Work for Wages
Jacobus Koopman used a government land-reform loan to buy the Suid Bokkeveld farm where he had worked for wages. He and thirteen neighbours turned that into Heiveld, an organic rooibos co-operative that later had to defend its independence from its own government.
In 2001, Jacobus Koopman did something he had never been in a position to do. He bought land. Not new land. The same Suid Bokkeveld farm where he had spent years working for wages under someone else's name on the title deed, bought back with a government land-redistribution loan. Koopman was not alone for long. Thirteen neighbours, small-scale farmers and sharecroppers who had picked and cut rooibos on land that was rarely their own, joined him that year to register a new organic rooibos producer.
They called the co-operative Heiveld, after the district, and built it on two decisions that still shape it. The first was organic certification: no pesticides, no synthetic fertiliser, the wild and cultivated rooibos hand-cut and sun-dried by the same low-intervention methods the Suid Bokkeveld's harvesters had worked out generations earlier, now the subject of its own sustainable-harvest research in this record. The second was Fairtrade certification, won in 2003, which opened the export door and let the members set a floor under their own prices rather than take whatever a buyer offered.
Both paid off in the plainest way a co-operative can measure: the market started paying attention. Heiveld grew from its founding fourteen to 62 landowning members by 2012, and roughly 73 by 2015, still a small fraction of an industry where, per the co-operative's own award citation, 98 percent of all rooibos comes from large-scale, white-owned farms. The Rooibos Heritage Route, a regional tourism and heritage body, credits Heiveld as the first black-owned exporting business the Cederberg had seen. A modest 60 to 70 tonnes of cultivated leaf (about 66 to 77 US tons) and a few tonnes of wild rooibos went out each year to Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and eight other countries beyond. In 2014 the UN Development Programme gave Heiveld an Equator Prize, its citation crediting the co-operative with roughly quadrupling local farming incomes, with profits routed back into the village school and its own subsidised water system rather than out to a distant shareholder.
The factory built to help them, in the district they had already helped themselves
None of that independence sat entirely comfortably with a provincial government that, by 2011, had allocated some R160 million (roughly US$22 million at 2011 exchange rates) to build its own rooibos-processing factory in the same district. It was a state-funded facility meant to lift small growers the way Heiveld already had. By 2015, Heiveld's members were describing something closer to pressure than partnership. A Mail & Guardian investigation reported farmers being warned in writing that they risked losing loaned equipment if they did not sell up to 70 percent of their harvest to the new government facility. Heiveld's then general manager, Alida Afrika, said the letter's contents amounted to bullying, adding plainly, "this is not giving a better life for all." One member, Gerrie Koopman, put the stakes the co-operative existed to protect in a single line: "this is the first time we control our lives. It feels good."
The distinction underneath the dispute was not sentimental, it was chemical. Heiveld's organic certification is worth real money precisely because it is strict: the state factory processed non-organic tea and distributed chemically treated seed, and any field planted with that seed stood to lose its organic status for three years. A factory built to help small rooibos farmers was, on Heiveld's own accounting, capable of quietly undoing the one thing that had made its members' cups worth more than the district's cheapest leaf.
How that particular standoff has since settled is not part of the record here. What is plain is that Heiveld is still trading, still organic, and still choosing its own buyers. In June 2026, after a drought and a cold, flooded winter roughly halved the co-operative's harvest, it was Heiveld's fair-trade partner, not any government facility, that stepped in and raised the price it paid so members could afford to replant. Twenty-five years on from Jacobus Koopman buying back the field he used to work for someone else, that is still the arrangement the co-operative was built to make possible: the growers, not a factory built over their heads, deciding who gets to buy the harvest.
Sources: Rooibos Co-operatives, The Rooibos Heritage Route; Portrait d'entreprise: Heiveld ou l'empowerment des exportateurs sud-africains de rooibos, Actualites-CCI (2012); "Rooibos farmers: 'Empowerment isn't our cup of tea'", Mail & Guardian (Feb. 5, 2015); Heiveld Co-operative, Equator Initiative, UNDP; Heiveld Co-operative Limited, Equator Prize case study, Equator Initiative, UNDP (2014); Heiveld Co-operative: A Community-Driven Sustainable Rooibos Industry, SANBI C.A.P.E. Partnership case study #11 (2009).