Western Cape Minister of Agriculture visits Backsberg

On Thursday afternoon the Western Cape Minister of Agriculture, Mr Cobus Dowry, came to visit the farm. The main motivation for his visit was to chat to my dad about some of the environmental and energy saving measures that we have implemented on the farm and in the winery.

We took the minster around the farm explaining the steps we have taken to becoming carbon neutral and the plan going forwards of making further improvements to our carbon footprint.

We spoke about the Eskom electricity crisis and the threat it can potentially pose to quality in the winery during harvest. If the power is off then, amongst other things, the cooling of wine in the winery cannot be controlled. If the wine is busy fermenting and the temperature goes too high then one can be faced with some major problems.

A measure that we have put in place to combat the electricity situation, is to build two sizeable water banks at the back of the winery. During off peak electricity tariff times (10pm-6am) we cool the 200 000 litres of stored water to between 3-5 degrees celcius. This gives us cooling capacity throughout the day and saves us the money we would have spent on electricity for cooling during the high and standard tariff periods. In the event that the electricity does go down, then we can hook up a small generator to a circulating pump and voilà, cooling in the winery. Investing in generator capacity for cooling and to run an entire winery during harvest would literally have cost millions. Apart from the direct cost saving to us, the added plus is that we are reducing demand for electricity during high and standard tariff periods and thus the capacity that Eskom needs to provide.


We went one step further and clad the water banks with straw bales and re-used some shade cloth to cover the roof of the water banks to ensure that the water stays as cool as possible during the day.


Other more recent projects on the go, that we showed the minister, include a methane digester which uses winery and farm waste to generate methane and a woodlot research program we are working with the University of Stellenbosch on to investigate the biomass of a number of different tree species.

SB