Dear Clark,

I recently re-read the book – Drive Out Hunger – by JJ Machobane and Robert Berold about the Machobane Farming System and I want to get more information about how to practice this African version of permaculture – which predates Bill Mollison’s permaculture by several decades – on my wife’s farm here in the Eastern Cape.

I remembered that you played a role in helping the ag professionals and the politicos in Lesotho to recognize the extraordinary prescience of JJ Machobane as early as the 1940’s about the necessity for people to take personal responsibility for growing their own food supply with resources which they already control. The book mentions intensively farming an acre of ground on a year round basis, situated close to where they live and their animals are penned at nite.

Is JJ still in the land of the living? Does he still make sense? Is he in a position to accept students? If, so how do I contact him? If he has passed on, who is the best person in Lesotho or the RSA to contact to be instructed in how to adapt the MFS to the conditions on my wife’s farm about 5 kms from Bisho (between Peelton and Hanover villages). If you google these villages, it is the small thatched cottage right beside an enormous spreading wild fig tree off Blaney Rd.

In search and service,

Cecil
TechnoShare (SA)

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