About
About this course
Who it is for
Anyone responsible for animals on South African land: the commercial cattleman deciding whether to lengthen recovery periods, the smallholder outside Meyerton working out whether twenty ewes can pay for themselves, the emerging farmer on communal veld, the agricultural student who has been taught production but not context, and the family thinking about their second generation on the same ground.
It assumes no prior training. It does assume you would rather be told something uncomfortable and true than something comfortable and wrong.
What "regenerative" means here
Not a certification, not a brand, and not a promise that you can stop thinking. Regenerative animal husbandry in this course means managing livestock so that the land's capacity to produce goes up over time rather than down — measured in soil cover, plant diversity, water infiltration, and ultimately in kilograms produced per hectare per millimetre of rain. The animal is the tool. Your management of its timing is the actual work.
Six principles run through every module: context first, minimise disturbance, keep the soil covered, keep a living root, maximise diversity, and integrate animals. To those we add a seventh that South Africa insists on: manage for the drought you have not had yet.
How it was researched
The course was built from fourteen domain research packs — veld and grazing ecology, soils and water, animal health, law and compliance, economics and markets, and one per animal group — each researched against South African primary sources and then handed to a separate adversarial reviewer whose only job was to find what was wrong with it. Numbers, Act names and numbers, disease and controlled-area claims, and every "South Africa is the world's largest…" assertion were independently re-verified before any lesson was written from them.
Priority went to South African official and scientific sources — DALRRD, the Agricultural Research Council, SANBI, Onderstepoort, the published Acts themselves, and the South African peer-reviewed literature — then to industry bodies and universities, then to the local farming press. International material is used for principle and is labelled as such.
Where a claim could not be independently verified it is marked [UNVERIFIED] in the text. That is deliberate. A visible gap is safer than an invisible guess.
What it is not
This course is education, not advice.
- Animal health. No dose, withdrawal period or treatment protocol in this course should be applied to an animal without a registered veterinarian. We teach the decision rule and then route you to the label, the vet, or the Act. Getting this wrong kills animals and can make your meat or milk unsaleable.
- Law. Acts are named so you can look them up. Legislation is amended; the version you must comply with is the current one, and how it applies to your operation is a question for a qualified professional.
- Money. Every price and cost carries the date it was true. Treat all of them as illustrations of a method, not as current quotes.
- Your land. No stocking rate in this or any other course applies to your farm. The veld in front of you is the authority.
Delta Farms
Delta Farms sits at Shamar, outside Meyerton in the Midvaal, on the Highveld of Gauteng — summer rainfall, hard winter frost, and the Vaal River system that gives the farm its mark. Where a lesson needs a worked example, it is usually worked here: on roughly 600–700 mm of highly variable summer rain, on veld that produces well from November and then loses its protein by April, close enough to Gauteng's markets to sell direct and close enough to its problems to have to think about them.
The course is national in scope. The Highveld is simply where we do the arithmetic out loud.