Sunday, September 02, 2018

Apples, Africa and Apostasy


Daan Strydom
APOSTASY
Theft, Covetousness, and Government as God’s Replacement
By Stephen L. Wilmeth



            The legend of Daan Strydom reverberated across California apple culture before I met him.
            When I picked him up at the airport for our first visit, I found myself fidgeting with nervous expectation. Here I was catapulted into the role of tree fruit grower with a background that had no relationship with the elegant dirt of Kern, Tulare, Fresno, and Madera counties, and, Daan from South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, was perhaps the premier apple mind in the world.
            Since our time that first visit was brief, the schedule was tight. Instead of taking him to his motel, we went directly to the nearest Granny Smith orchard. When we exited the pickup, I reached for my shears.
            “Why are you taking those?” he asked. “We may not even put a shear in this orchard this year.”
            The rest is history. From an annual production of some 375 boxes of fruit per acre, the combined orchards became 1100 box per acre producers. Pruning was just one component of a complex system of practices.
            We analyzed leaf and soil analyses together. We could talk M-7, own root, or Mark with conviction. We learned what to root plow, what to delay head, and what to prune in full dormancy. We debated angles manipulating vegetative or fruiting characteristics. We established goals for shoot growth and could observe general results without lab analyses.
            Mostly, he taught us learning never stopped. It was a permanent pursuit. Daan Strydom wasn’t just a university professor or fruit grower. He was a student of tree fruit culture that had no bounds. When one horizon was reached the next was illuminated.
            Another contagious characteristic was his optimism. To explain what that meant in context, he was a native-born son of Africa where chaos was always a factor. While Daan was in our lives, he was witnessing the destruction and confiscation of farmland in his home country that continues to this day. His children were moving their assets out of the country to Australia, but he was honor bound.
            “Our leaders will come to their senses and realize what has made our outpost so unique and productive,” he once told me.
            I don’t know if he is still alive, but we do know his unique outpost of shared lands with South Africa and Zimbabwe, once the great breadbasket hope of all of Africa, is simmering in endemic corruption and hate. In three decades, Zimbabwe has been dismantled and has become an agricultural and societal wasteland. Little children look like dogied calves with their big bellies, and 70% of the once hugely productive farmland is standing fallow after Mugabe expropriation of farmland, land that wasn’t just discovered, but created from the hands, minds, and sweat of … a once free people.
            APOSTASY
            Zimbabwe isn’t alone. South Africa is now being dismantled with farm and private property expropriation. There is an estimate that 30,000,000 meals a day of agricultural production has now been eliminated by the goons and imbeciles of the combined governments. Today, South Africa is legislating without restraint the theft of more farmland. Where there were once 4,500 farmers in Zimbabwe some 370 remain. Of 500 coffee producers there, only three remain.
            In all cases, the political blame has been placed on white conspiracy of one form or another. Either it is organic in that the poor blacks were robbed of the most fertile lands or conspiring white capitalistic countries are isolating the southern cape countries from any share of the currently debated pie. The truth is it has always been a race and bias driven drivel.
            Perhaps, Zimbabwe’s model is the most profound test case of the genius of a people committed to an agricultural puzzle that evolved from nothing to a shining success. It is isolated from any sea port and thousands of miles from major population centers and markets. It had huge logistical constraints of farm to market infrastructure. It was void of any industrial base. It depended on the outside for all parts and input sourcing, and, yet, it arose to be a near golden breadbasket that the rest of Africa could emulate.
            Unlike the tedious political accusations continuing today, there was no single farm discovered that formed the genesis of the miracle. It was the unbridled work ethic and self-sculptured brilliance of men like Daan Strydom that carved it all out of raw land and sourced water to make things grow. It is a parallel drama to our own agricultural miracle only under smaller and perhaps more difficult conditions.
Now, it is being destroyed by unearned medal bedecked smirch merchants who are absolutely incapable of leading a two-car funeral procession much less operating the now fallow 320 acre farms they have stolen and doled out to their aunts, uncles and cousins.
And, the world watches.
Daan Strydom
On one those beautiful California mornings ablaze with blooming trees, Daan called a halt to walk in an older orchard of open vase trained peaches.
“Gentlemen, look at this miracle of this creation,” he said. “That is what we call apostasy.”
His reference was the growth characteristics of the trees with successive layers of limb and shoot growth reaching around and up for the sun and life as if arms were being raised to the heavens.
We were silenced in the message.
The irony, however, cannot be overlooked. In that context, crops reach to the sun for basic sustenance. On the other hand, the biblical version of the definition is the formal abandonment of religious or political beliefs. Daan’s life and his land stand in juxtaposition to that divergence. His government is displacing God, but there was never abandonment of his spirituality.
On the contrary, his amazement was underscored in devotion toward the Creator of all things.

Steve Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “In our last conversation, Daan asked about our production. When I told him, he suggested I had passed his class.”

See Land Reform As Social Justice: The Case of South Africa

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