How Rooibos Became a Crop, With Help From an Ant Heap

Every cup of rooibos you have ever poured began as a deliberately planted seed, and that is younger history than you might guess. The red bush grew wild in the Cederberg for centuries before anyone farmed it. The reason no one did is simple: its seed is very hard to collect, and harder still to make sprout. The first reliable supply of that seed, the supply that turned a wild plant into a crop, came out of an ant heap.

A bush that does not give up its seed easily

Aspalathus linearis makes small seeds that drop low into the scrub, scatter, and are easily lost on the sandy ground. Each one also carries a hard outer coat that holds it dormant until weather and time wear the coat down. For a wild plant in a dry climate that hard coat is an advantage, because it staggers germination across many seasons, so one bad year does not wipe out the next generation. For anyone hoping to sow a field, it is a double problem. You cannot plant seed you cannot find, and the little you do find mostly refuses to come up.

That is why, well into the twentieth century, rooibos was gathered from the mountains rather than grown. Demand was the thing that finally forced the question. As the tea found buyers, the wild stands could not keep pace, and supply began to fail.

The Clanwilliam doctor who wanted a crop

In the late 1920s a district surgeon in Clanwilliam named Pieter le Fras Nortier set out to solve it. He was a doctor by profession and a naturalist by inclination, and he proposed to develop a farmed variety of the wild bush. From early 1930 he had cultivation experiments running, in partnership with the farmers Oloff Bergh and William Riordan, on Riordan's farm Klein Kliphuis, a near neighbour deep in the Cederberg, and on Bergh's farm Varkfontein in the Pakhuis mountains.

First he needed seed, and seed was the bottleneck. By the account in the ethnographic history the South African Rooibos Council commissioned, Nortier worked with members of the local Coloured community to procure rooibos seed, paying by the amount each collector brought in. The going rate was five pounds per matchbox, a serious sum in those years (roughly R7,000 today, by the same account). Even at that price the matchboxes came in slowly, a few hard grains at a time, because the seed was simply that difficult to glean by hand from the scrub.

The ants had been collecting it all along

The supply that finally arrived came from a source no amount of money had thought to look for. Among the seed collectors Nortier paid were Hans and Tryntjie Swart, and they noticed something the others had missed: ants were gathering rooibos seed and storing it underground, eating the shell away and leaving the inner seed behind. The Swarts began digging the anthills open, removing the rooibos seed, and delivering it to Nortier. In a recorded interview kept in the Rooibos Ltd archive, Tryntjie said she had discovered the method with her husband. It was the breakthrough: an ant store held far more clean seed than a person could pick up by hand from the scrub.

How that works is worth a moment. The local harvester ant, Messor capensis, gathers and caches seed in chambers below ground, and rooibos seed is exactly the kind of small, hard grain it collects. A field study in the Karoo by S. J. Milton and W. R. J. Dean, published in the Journal of Arid Environments in 1993, estimated these ants collecting about 4.1 million seeds a year per hectare, roughly 5 kilograms, which came to a tenth of all the seed and nearly a fifth of the yearly seed mass the common plants dropped. The ants were not helping anyone. They were stocking their own stores, and those stores turned out to be the most efficient seed-collection operation in the district. The first dependable supply of rooibos planting seed came out of their nests, opened by two people who watched where the ants were going.

Waking the seed

Seed in hand, Nortier still faced the second half of the problem, which was that so little of it sprouted. The hard coat had to be broken before the seed would take. He worked out that he could scarify it, that is, nick or abrade the coat so that water could reach the seed inside. Once the seed was scarified, by the AgriOrbit account, it germinated readily. This time it grew.

From the 1930s on, rooibos could be planted on purpose rather than foraged by luck. Nortier selected his stock from seed gathered in the Rocklands and the Grootkloof valley, and those early selections, still known as the Nortier type, became the backbone of the planted crop. In 1948 the University of Stellenbosch gave him an honorary doctorate for the work.

The seed was the missing piece, not the trade

A trade in rooibos already existed by then. From the early 1900s the merchant Benjamin Ginsberg, who came from a family of tea traders, bought rooibos from Cederberg harvesters and sold it on. He is often called the father of the commercial rooibos trade, and is said to have cured the leaf by fermentation in barrels, the step that gives red rooibos its colour and flavour. Historians treat the "first" claim with some caution. The Gorelik history notes that rooibos could be bought in the Cederberg even earlier, and that Ginsberg's exact role should be explored further. What is not in doubt is that the growing was still beyond reach.

So the buying, the selling, and even the curing were in place early. What was missing was the ability to grow the plant reliably, on a farm, at scale. That is the piece Nortier supplied, and the seed for it came in part from the underground stores of ants. You need not know any of this to pour a caffeine-free cup before bed. But it is there in the record, and it is the kind of thing few think to ask. The red bush took a long time becoming a crop, and a colony of seed-hoarding ants is the reason it became one at all.