What started as a project to help land reform farmers become more productive and commercially viable has developed into the successful Mdukatshani Rural Livestock Project, which facilitates rural auction sales of goats. So far, the project has earned 9000 rural farmers about R200-R300 million. The project has facilitated several auctions to set fair market prices for livestock, reducing the exploitation by speculators. A cashless system has also been introduced for secure transactions. Behind this success is Rauri Alcock, who told Biznews in an interview that most of the farmers they work with are women. Alcock said they have decided to concentrate on goats because they are low-hanging fruit, with 80-90% of the national goat herd owned by African farmers. Alcock describes the goats, found all over the rural areas of South Africa, as being similar to cockroaches—they will eat anything and can push back against invasive species encroaching on grasslands, which is also good for the environment. Most of the goats sold are for ancestral sacrificial ceremonies. Alcock wants to scale the project and his aim is ultimately to see regular sales rural areas and to reduce imports from countries like Botswana and Namibia.
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Highlights from the interview
Rauri Alcock, heading the Mdukatshani Rural Livestock Project, discusses his work to commercialise rural livestock farming, focusing on goats, cattle, and chickens. The project aims to address issues around land reform and rural poverty by enhancing livestock productivity without relying on handouts. Alcock explains that his family has been involved in rural development since the 1960s, with the project originating from efforts to model productive and commercially viable farms in rural areas, particularly for land reform beneficiaries. It also aims to offer alternative livelihoods for rural youth, who often face unemployment after education.
Alcock highlights that women are the primary farmers in these areas, as men often migrate to urban centres for work. The project has had success, including sales generating between 200 to 300 million Rand for rural farmers. Goats, in particular, are a focus because they are predominantly owned by Black farmers, and the goat market is valued at R4.5 billion annually. The project runs auctions to help set fair market prices and reduce exploitation by speculators. These auctions ensure transparency, provide a stable income for farmers, and offer cashless payment systems for safety.
Although the project initially had government support, it has faced challenges in ongoing collaboration with local authorities. Alcock envisions transforming rural areas into thriving hubs of secure, profitable livestock farming, aiming to reduce imports of goats and address climate change through sustainable practices, like using goats to combat bush encroachment. Ultimately, the goal is to improve the lives of rural women and build resilient, future-proof farming systems.
Edited transcript of the interview
Linda van Tilburg (00:31.143)
Rauri Alcock heads the Mdukatshani Rural Livestock Project, which aims to commercialise local goat, cattle, and chicken farming. He’s in the BizNews studio to tell us more about the program.
Linda Tilburg (01:05.563)
The first question I have to ask you is, are you G.G. Alcock’s brother?
Rauri Alcock (01:10.138)
Yes, I’m G.G.’s younger brother and we work in very different environments. I work for rural development. He seems to generally work for capitalism, but we work together quite a lot around ideas and supporting each other in our work.
Linda Tilburg (01:35.057)
Can you give us an overview of the Mdukatshani Goat Agribusiness Pilot Project? How did it come about?
Rauri Alcock (01:46.404)
We’ve been working in development for a long time. The family has been involved since the 60s. But initially, the project looked at land reform, which I think was politically expedient at the time. Then there was a question I think a lot of people would ask, okay, so people have land, people have livestock, what’s happening to these farms? So, we tried to create a project to answer some of these questions in terms of here’s an answer to rural agriculture with land reform and farmers. How can you model something to show that land reform farms can be productive and commercially useful? I think everyone in South Africa clutches their heads at the thought of land reform and where it’s got us. Initially, we worked a lot in land reform. We did the pilot land reform in under President Mandela.
So, the premise of this project is saying, okay, you’ve got lots of land, got a huge number of livestock in rural areas. I’m sure anybody who drives through our rural areas can see how much livestock there is. But how do you get that livestock more productive and into the market? And how do you support the rural poor that you see in those areas without giving handouts? Helpfully, they have livestock so you don’t have to do the handout. So, the project was conceptualised around that.
Then looking at how you get any form of support for the rural youth or just even young people in this country. There are millions of young people that we put through some sort of education system and they have no jobs. They have nothing. They sit in these rural areas and urban areas wondering how they’re going to get money. So, it was also something trying to see how we offer some sort of alternative to these young people where they don’t have to be farmers because I think it’s optimistic to think young people want to be farmers. It seems very grimy and impractical compared to what they have aspirations for. But how do you create systems that they can have some sort of money out of farming? So that was what the project was built around.
Linda Tilburg (04:27.683)
You also want to transform women’s lives. So, are a lot of these farmers women?
Rauri Alcock (04:33.774)
Generally, we work with women farmers and it’s not because of any sort of empathetic or sympathetic thing. It is just women farmers are the people that are on the ground. That is who is in charge of these rural homesteads. Men generally go to Johannesburg, become migrant labourers, they go to the urban areas. They’re much more mobile. Women often end up with children, at home and often those households are women-headed. If you’re to work with rural farmers, generally you’re going to work with women because that’s who you’ll find on the ground and who makes day-to-day decisions, who are in charge of the economies of those areas, who look at the child grants and decide how to spend them. So, that is where we chose to work with women.
Linda Tilburg (05:33.698)
Are you making progress with the programme?
Rauri Alcock (05:38.97)
I think the project has been largely successful in terms of as a pilot that did lay out that this is possible. The sales that we earned about R200 to 300 million for rural farmers in these rural areas. So, we’re talking about, and I think this sometimes catches people, farmers are people that live on the land and have livestock. That’s our reference point. They don’t have farms. I think our extension system in South Africa is based on farmers having farms and farmers having farms becomes the tenderpreneurs, the 30,000 tenderpreneurs. But actually, there’s a lot of people living on land that own land that have livestock that need support. But they are not regarded as farmers. So, we look at those as farmers.
The project has brought goats to the foreground. Goats are a low-hanging fruit. That is one of the only types of livestock in the country that is predominantly owned by Black and African farmers. 80 – 90 % of our national herd is owned by African farmers. It is something that we don’t have to give people. It is something they already own and have some tools around. The goat sales in this country, we estimate it to be about R4.5 billion a year and that is fall or traditional sacrifice. None of that ends up as goat meat.I think that’s often also something people don’t understand is if there are so many millions of goats being slaughtered every year, where do they go?
The answer is that most Nguni’s like Swazi, Zulu, and Shangaan people have ancestral worship ceremonies. For both sacrifice and bride wealth, they use goats. So, there’s a lot of goats that get brought in. In the past, these were imported from Namibia. We used to import about a million goats a year. It’s now dropped to about 150,000 goats a year that are brought in from Namibia, which is about half a billion rand. These goats are fed into the market predominantly from Namibia, Kwazulu-Natal and then fed into the market.
So, we look at goats as one of the things we can model agriculture and farming. It’s not the only livestock that we work on.
Linda Tilburg (08:36.664)
You had a recent auction of goats. How did that go?
Rauri Alcock (08:42.298)
So, we have had several auctions. Auctions are a two-fold thing. We use auctions to set the prices for farmers. So, in the past and to a large extent, still currently you have speculators, who’s a guy in a bakkie driving around these areas buying goats. There’ve always been this thing of you can’t sell to speculators because they crook you out of money. Their prices are up for debate. We have auctions in areas so that people can go to auctions, and watch the goats being auctioned. They can see the prices that are reached for different colours, different sizes, and different ages of goats. Those prices are then set for that area. So, when a speculator does arrive at your yard, you know the price of goats because you’ve been to an auction where they’ve been sold and you can say, up, I know a goat this size has sold for so much.
There’s a lot involved in that auction. Colours are very important. White goats are very important. Black goats don’t sell very well at all because of the sacrifice stuff and because of sort of Christian type thinking that has sort of spread through the country in terms of white is good, black is bad sort of stuff. So black goats are very difficult to sell and white goats are quite easy to sell and you get higher prices. So, there are various things elements to the auction. What we do is we try and have monthly auctions at small rural towns on pension days. Then we have larger auctions when there is Easter or Christmas where you have a large number of livestock to be sold off. But it is a trend-setting system rather than the bulk of goats.
The bulk of goats are still sold through systems we’ve set up where we set up a speculator, which is usually a young guy in a vehicle that he’s bought for himself. We set him up on a WhatsApp group with a local farming group. They then WhatsApp each other saying, look, I’m looking for 20 goats and am coming tomorrow, these are sort of prices. He sends pictures of the goats so that they can sort of agree not to disagree when they get there and he picks up the goats and pays the money and goes.
There is a lot of cash in the system, which is a large reason why people don’t like working in rural areas, they get robbed or murdered. Coming into rural areas with cash in hand two or three times, by the fourth time you probably usually get whacked. We had to set up systems of payment which are either cashless or based on meeting at the police station to collect your cash and deliver the livestock or that sort of stuff.
The benefit we bring as a sort of organisation is that we ensure that the livestock aren’t stolen, they are of high quality and have been medically vetted so that they can be sold and won’t spread diseases. This has been very successful. I think it’s one of the very successful parts of the program is that these sales now continue and people make half a million rand from a sale if they have 200 goats; that’s half a million rand and it goes straight into people’s pockets. We will continue.
Our most successful projects are on land reform farms. We work in areas that are not land reform farms, but when they are land reform farm, you find that people have more access to resources, to grazing and bush. So, quite bad farms, thornveld farms, which is a swear word among farmers, get very good sales and people sell and buy goats. We could show that as a result of land reform, farmers have a hugely increased ability to build their goat herds and sell their goat herds.
Linda Tilburg (13:10.719)
And do you have support from government agencies for this?
Rauri Alcock (13:11.874)
We worked with government initially. The problem with government, I suppose, is that government battles to see any programmes that don’t involve tenders and don’t involve some sort of political expediency where you have to grease the local palms.
So, we did work very well with the National Department of Agriculture and Land Reform, and I think that went very well. We did a pilot. The local department we’ve had more complicated relationships with, but at the moment we don’t work with them specifically, which is a great pity. I think the program is much missed, but we are continuing to try and engage with them. So, what we tried to do from the initial pilot is that we drew up or wrote up a Goat Master Plan for the whole country. Indicating these are the sort of things we should be doing as a country around goats. This could be Malelane, Limpopo, Mpumalanga. Anywhere, where have rural communities and goats. We put together a sort of framework of what you should do.
We have worked quite strongly to get that into the Agricultural and Agro-processing Master Plan. That seems stuck at the moment for, I assume, political reasons. It’s supposed to be our 20-year agricultural plan for the country and has quite a lot of difference in terms of what agriculture could be done by rural communities. But so that’s where we’ve put it with the government to try and get it embedded nationally and then trying to get a second part of the pilot which starts looking as we’re talking about this commercialisation and scaling up and scaling out to other areas.
Linda Tilburg (15:21.77)
So, is that your dream?
Rauri Alcock (15:24.876)
That would be to see rural areas transformed into places where there are regular sales with security, not security as in security police or security guards, but security in terms of people knowing they’re selling and they’re not selling stolen livestock and they can come with some form of cashless payment and pay for these and quite quickly, we could reduce all our imports of goats through Botswana and Namibia, which we’re currently importing at the moment. It’s crazy if you think of most rural areas and most townships in this country, you see goats everywhere. Well, how is it possible that we’re importing goats? This is one thing we shouldn’t be importing.
So, yes, part of our dream would be that livestock and rural women can sell regularly and make money from livestock and improve their own homes, but also just those rural areas into quite useful sort of farming systems. The goats are one of the few things that we know that can push back on climate change and bush encroachment.
Bush encroachment is one of our biggest problems in the country in terms of acacia and filling up the grasslands. Goats can and will push back on bush, whereas game reserves and cattle don’t. Goats can deal with the hot and dry conditions. In a way, goat farming is also future-proofing rural areas against climate change, because they will survive. They are like cockroaches; they will hold together no matter what the environment turns into.
Linda Tilburg (17:23.113)
Ja, goats eat everything. We lived on a small farm and they even ate the washing off the line.
Rauri Alcock (17:29.946)
I think it was an interesting turning point for us as an NGO. We worked for a long time on communal gardens and tried these blooming things and you just never get them right, Communal gardens we’ve been trying for years and years. We eventually worked out that we’re spending more time trying to keep the livestock out than farming stuff inside there.
That was sort of a moment of, okay, well, why don’t we just work with the livestock? They are the majority and generally farming land that is excluded from livestock is by powerful men. Powerful men keep fields, keep gardens. When we started looking at the livestock that was bothering us so much, turned out to be owned by women mainly. So, we thought, well, why don’t we just work where the energy is and that is one of our turning points, is just how we started thinking about rural development.
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