By Lucille Botha
She dreams of planting pumpkins because when you farm with pumpkins, you know you have plenty of space, says Lindie-Alet van Staden, the garden and olive grove manager of L’Ormarins’ who was recently named the Western Cape’s 2024 Western Cape Prestige Agri-Worker of the Year.
When she steps out of her bakkie in the L’Ormarins’ parking lot, her eyes scan the area, and she quickly shoots off some instructions to her team over the two-way radio. She waves away the congratulations as we walk through the L’Ormarins’ parking lot: “It’s not that recognition isn’t nice, but I don’t let such things go to my head. I didn’t even collect my horticulture degree; my Dad had to post it to me,” she says with a laugh.
Lindie-Alet has been the garden and olive grove manager at the L’Ormarins wine estate, owned by Dr Johann Rupert, for three years. The meticulously maintained gardens cover about 65 hectares, the olive groves span 3 hectares, and she’s also responsible for about 60 beehives. The extensive composting facility, environmental issues (including writing reports on invasive species) and rehabilitation projects to re-establish vegetation also require her attention. Thirty-four permanent team members and another 34 contractors report to her.
“I enjoy the diversity; it suits my personality,” says Lindie-Alet, who admits she doesn’t walk; she runs.
With everything she accomplishes, one would never guess that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2017 after experiencing double vision. “My neurologists and specialists say I should sometimes calm down and realise I have a condition, but I don’t read up on side effects or what could happen; instead, I push myself extra hard and refuse to sit still. I don’t want a medical condition to define my life.”
Lindie-Alet grew up in Brits, where her beloved father, Willem, and grandfather, Piet, farmed. After the farm was sold, Willem managed the agricultural division of Losperfontein prison, where he planted vegetables for the mess halls and ran a dairy. He also made butter, buttermilk, yoghurt, and cheese.
“My father did more with five hectares than some people do with 50!”
Willem passed away in 2020, just 18 months after Lindie-Alet’s mother, Sandra.
“He would have been very proud of where I work now and of this honour because it’s about agriculture.”
She says he enjoyed visiting her at the Lourensford Estate, near Somerset West, where she got her first position just days after earning her degree in horticulture cum laude from the Tshwane University of Technology.
A Farm in Town
It was a close call, or Lindie-Alet would have been lost to agriculture.
“When you grow up in a small town, everyone expects you to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer to gain respect. Nobody tells you to go farm unless you’re going to inherit your parents’ farm. It’s as if people don’t see the value of agriculture and farming. I did very well in all my subjects at school, but my teachers said I would waste my life if I didn’t take certain subjects because then I couldn’t become a doctor or similar profession.
“I considered becoming a civil engineer, but my parents couldn’t afford the studies. So, I started working at a company that would later give me a bursary. It was late one night at the airport. We were doing concrete tests, and I was rough from the cement, surrounded by a concrete jungle. I realised, no, I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do what I grew up with.”
She remembers not having a PlayStation as a child and says she probably was the only child who didn’t know who Britney Spears was because she was always outside and in the garden.
Lindie-Alet is proud of how she got where she is – in her way. After a few months at Lourensford, they asked her to take over the 18-hectare export protea farm. That experience led to an opportunity at Oak Valley Estate in Grabouw, where she was responsible for the cut flower farming in tunnels. Here, she also started beekeeping as a hobby.
Then L’Ormarins came knocking, looking for someone who could handle cut flowers, olives, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and bees. “With all the moving around, I gained some experience in everything! Life works out as it should.”
Although she’s always on the move and constantly has plans swirling in her head, Lindie-Alet’s work doesn’t stop when she returns over the Helshoogte Pass to her house in Somerset West in the evenings.
“Everything I have at work, I also have at home: a vegetable garden, olives, bees, and chickens. I also set up a small greenhouse to extend the growing season of tomatoes and cucumbers. It feels like a small farm in the middle of town,” she says excitedly about the garden where she mows the grass and does irrigation. She also keeps Potchefstroom Koekoek, Boschvelder, and Lohmann Brown chickens.
“My favourite is Dino, an Easter Egger that lays blue eggs and looks like a dinosaur!” she says, showing photos of him on her phone.
Lindie-Alet inherited her mother’s talent in the kitchen – people still ask her for her mother’s unbeatable chocolate cake and milk tart recipes. With the eggs, she makes fresh pasta and cooked the 120 kg of tomatoes she harvested from her garden during the winter holiday (“when it rains and I have to look at the garden through the window”) into delicious sauces and chutney. She ferments chillies for 14 months, which she then processes with the tomatoes.
Mad about seed
“I plant 80 varieties of tomatoes (four of each type, like Banana Legs, black and purple tomatoes), 13 types of potatoes, and I have Yugoslavian finger squashes, crooked-neck squashes, and round baby marrows. I’ve now planted green corn: When you harvest and dry it, it turns moss green, and you make green corn porridge from it. When I buy seeds, I always look at their appearance and choose what’s difficult to grow. I don’t have patience for sitting and reading, but when it comes to vegetables, I read every single profile, especially if the seed has a story.”
For Lindie-Alet, there’s nothing better than spoiling others with her harvests.
“Where others take a bottle of wine or a bunch of flowers when visiting someone, I pack a basket with vegetables and a pack of blue eggs. It’s wonderful to see how people appreciate it.”
Her town garden is an ecosystem where vegetables that have been affected by insects are fed to the chickens, and rabbit manure is used in the vegetable garden.
Lindie-Alet has two beehives and has set up hives for two other people.
“I never did a course, but I believe you shouldn’t be afraid, even though I’ve been stung quite well!”
Town honey tastes completely different from farm honey. “I call my honey suburban honey because I don’t know where it comes from. One year, it tasted like fynbos, and the year when the mountain burned, it tasted like eucalyptus mixed with citrus. The last batch tasted like fudge – why, I don’t know!” She says she has tasted pumpkin honey, but that myrtle honey is her favourite.
Her biggest dream is to exchange her town garden for a farm.
“Even when I studied horticulture, my projects were about food and vegetable gardens. Most things in my life turn back to vegetables. I’d love an experimental learning area on the farm to teach people about food. If you can expose people, there’s no turning back once the bug bites them.”
And, of course, she wants to plant pumpkins, especially boer pumpkins. “Because when you can plant pumpkins, you know you have plenty of space.”
Start at the Bottom
Wherever Lindie-Alet has worked, she has always applied two principles: Start at the bottom and pay attention to the people you work with.
“My father and grandfather taught me to put people first because you can’t do the work if it wasn’t for them. It’s not always easy because there are Days of our Lives and Bold and the Beautiful cases in between. In the mornings, there’s a line of people in front of my office who want to talk about their problems, and sometimes, we struggle to understand each other due to language differences. But I’ve realised it doesn’t matter what race I am, what language I speak, or how many cultural differences we have, in the end, we all laugh in the same language.”
Lindie-Alet respects each of her team members and shows interest in their lives.
“When you know your people and their circumstances, you realise it’s not always so easy to say leave your home at home and your work at work. Every person in my team has a story, and I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a bad worker. You must use everyone’s strengths and employ them according to their potential.”
She tells of Thulani, Solly, Victor, and Beulah, who are thriving thanks to her respect and finding them the correct position on the team. “If you’re a woman who has to give orders to a bunch of men who are twice your age, they’re initially very sceptical, but I’ve seen if you listen to them and treat them with respect, they’ll do the same to you. I realised I would have to start delegating, and how you train people determines whether they support you.”
Lindie-Alet often says that regardless of how many hectares a farmer has or how big their harvests are, they will not be successful if the people on the ground aren’t strong. From the first day in her first job – when she walked in “fresh from university with a bouncy ponytail” – she had to manage people.
“I started as a supervisor, earning the same salary as the foreman. It’s an industry where you work long hours and are in a constantly changing environment – one moment you are in the sun, the next there’s a cloudburst. Your first wheels aren’t a fancy bakkie but a wheelbarrow. I look now at how many people who studied with me didn’t make it in the industry, and it’s because they thought they had papers (qualifications) and didn’t have to start at the bottom. But if you start at the bottom, you can get somewhere.”
Everyone Has Potential
The interview with Lindie-Alet takes place shortly before her inauguration as a Western Cape Prestige Agri Workers Forum member, a forum in which all previous competition winners serve. “I would like to be a voice for agricultural workers on the forum. People are afraid to speak; they need someone they can trust to be their voice. And I don’t think anyone will want to keep up with me when I plant vegetable gardens everywhere!”
Even during the different rounds of the competition, Lindie-Alet concentrated on speaking on behalf of the people working the land. It was the farm’s human resources department that decided to enter Lindie-Alet in the middle management category of the annual competition, which this year had 1 233 participants.
“My first reaction was: For what? But they submitted a motivation, so I had to go for the interviews. They were intense questions that made you think. Fortunately, I only realised afterwards what important people conducted the interviews. It was very stressful, and I had to pay close attention to my body language, but the moment I started talking about my people, I didn’t stop!”
She never dreamed in her wildest dreams that she would be named the top agricultural worker in the Franschhoek region (“there were many, many smart people participating”), let alone the overall winner.
“I wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for my people,” she emphasises again.
Lindie-Alet is crazy about heritage seeds, and her friends have considered intervening because when she submits her tax return and gets something back from the South African Revenue Service, she spends it at Living Seeds. She once bought 146 different types of seeds in one go. “Many things in life go back to the concept of seed. To think you can push a small seed into the ground, and it can become a tree. If such a small thing in life has so much potential, why can’t a cleaner or general worker also rise to the top?”
African Farming asked:
What valuable lessons did you learn from your father, Willem?
Something as simple as planting peas! We planted rows and rows of peas every year, but it took me years to get right in the Cape climate. In wintertime, I’ll plant the whole garden full of peas because it gives nitrogen to the soil and a pea harvest. When the tomato season arrives, my soil is ready for it. My father was also someone who liked to give. We grew up poor, but what we had, we shared.
Sometimes, there wasn’t food for the cattle at correctional services, so my father would help farmers in the area on their farms in his free time in exchange for grass he could bale – and it wasn’t even his cattle.
My father also taught me if you want to win your team’s trust, you must start at the bottom. You must be willing to get dirty yourself. Sometimes, you feel like you’re someone’s doormat, but it ultimately builds you into the person you are.
Do you have a mentor?
I never worked directly with Uncle Piet Karsten at Lourensford, but everything we did on the farm was according to how he wanted it. He said the farmer’s best fertiliser is his footsteps. Also, be strict with discipline but gentle with people. You remember such things. You rarely meet someone in farming who has worked themselves to the top and still puts people first. I have realised that you’ll move forward if your people are happy. You’re only as good as the team under you.
