Tagged: smallholder farmers

1. 01 The trade · 12 Jul 2026 The Farmer Who Bought Back the Farm He Worked 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.
2. 02 The trade · 5 Mar 2026 Three Different Promises on a Rooibos Label Organic, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance are three different promises on a rooibos label, not one certification. Here is what each stamp verifies, and what predicts which farmers hold one.
3. 03 The process · 13 Dec 2025 The Cut That Used to Take All Day Cutting a rooibos harvest into tea once meant an axe and an entire day's work by hand. Here is how that job passed from a worker's own arm, to one family's private farms, to a single government board that owned the only legal cutting operation in the country, and finally, only in the last two decades, to the growers themselves.