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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