Curriculum · Delta Farms

Module 01

Reading the Land You Actually Have

The course opens on the land, not the livestock. You place your farm in a biome, veld type and rainfall regime, learn the habit that protects you from bad numbers, start the farm file that every later module writes into, and — so that nobody waits blind — run a first pass of the five-gate enterprise test on the animals you came here to learn about.

01 Land First: Why the Ground Comes Before the AnimalSettles why this course runs land-then-animal, and shows every learner exactly which module their animal lives in. 11 min
02 The Seven Principles as Constraints, Not SlogansSettles what each principle actually forbids and permits on South African veld, including the seventh that SA conditions force. 12 min
03 Your Site: Biome, Veld Type and RainfallSettles how to place your farm in a biome, veld type and rainfall regime, and what each one predicts about your year. 14 min
04 Where Did That Number Come From?Settles the habit that protects a farmer from bad advice, taught on real errors found inside this course's own research. 13 min
05 Build Your Farm FileSettles what you must go and find out about your own place before any later module can be applied to it. 13 min
06 Which Enterprise? The Five GatesSettles a first-pass decision on which two or three enterprises are worth carrying through the rest of the course. 14 min

Module 02

Soil and Water: The Engine Under the Grass

SA rangeland soils start from a carbon baseline most imported regenerative content does not imagine. This module gives the honest carbon picture, turns the binomial soil form into a prediction of where water goes, identifies the piosphere as the place structure actually fails, triages erosion against two national datasets that must never be added together, and hands over four quarterly observations you can do with a spade and a ring.

Module 03

The Grazing Ledger

This is the module the rest of the course calculates from. You convert every animal on the place into one feed-demand currency, read the DALRRD capacity map with the four limits the department itself states, compute grazing days against a real overstocked example, and learn a veld condition method you will still be repeating in five years.

Module 04

Recovery, Density and the Contested Evidence

A grazing plan is designed around recovery, not around paddock count or a fashionable density. Once the arithmetic from Module 3 is in place, this module lays out the plan, places the piosphere deliberately, and then puts the strongest published case for and against adaptive multi-paddock grazing side by side — including the SA fence-line study that found nothing.

Module 05

Fire, Bush and Pasture

Three interventions that change what the veld is, rather than how it is grazed. Each one is legally constrained, each one has an SA evidence base with a hole in it, and one of them openly contradicts a principle this course teaches — which is said out loud rather than smoothed over.

Module 06

The Fodder Flow and the Drought Plan

Standing winter veld can be abundant and still starve an animal. This module turns that into a month-by-month budget, follows the mineral chain from soil to bone to botulism, and ends with a drought trigger written in a good year — because the destocking decision taken in a bad one is always taken too late.

Module 07

Animal Health as an Ecological Problem

Most SA animal health failures are management failures with a pharmaceutical bill attached. This module builds the argument once — ticks and endemic stability, acaricide resistance, worms and refugia, whether your remedy still works, the duty to report, and the cold chain — so that every species module afterwards carries only what is genuinely species-specific.

Module 08

The Law of the Land and the Animal

The single most commonly broken law by SA smallholders is in the first lesson of this module. The rest covers the marking and movement documents that keep you out of a stock theft charge, the measures that bind you whether you know them or not, the land duties that already require several practices this course teaches, and the uncomfortable finding at the centre of SA regenerative marketing.

Module 09

The Money

Per animal, per LSU and per hectare are three different questions, and each lies in a predictable direction. This module fixes the denominators, shows where the money actually goes, teaches how SA prices are formed and which comparisons between them are meaningless, and finishes by auditing a published budget whose own arithmetic does not add up.

Module 10

Cattle: The Big Grazer

Cattle are the deepest-sourced species in this course and the one where the biggest money decisions are made. Every lesson opens on the two-way relationship with the land, then settles a decision: which cow, when to mate, what to feed in winter, what the grid pays, whether pasture dairy works, and whether an ox span is defensible.

Module 11

Sheep: Wool, Mutton and the Predation Problem

Sheep give an SA farmer two uncorrelated income streams and one uniquely SA constraint. This module settles the wool-versus-hair decision on trial data, builds a parasite protocol that starts with how low you graze, works the lambing window where survival and predation are the same decision, and prices a clip properly before asking whether the enterprise pays.

Module 12

Goats: Browse, Fibre and Cold

The national capacity map explicitly excludes the resource goats live on, which is where this module starts. It then settles meat goat reproduction on a real SA dataset, turns Rowswell's weather thresholds into a shearing decision, prices the mohair ladder correctly, handles the disease that limits where goats can be kept, and states plainly what cannot be said about dairy goats and cashmere.

Module 13

Pigs: Rooting, Law and the Grid

The imported pastured-pig model runs into South African law before it runs into biology. This module settles the swill prohibition and its two independent legal bases, works the ASF suspicion protocol including the step everyone forgets, prices hardy genetics against the PORCUS grid, and confronts outdoor farrowing losses with commercial benchmarks rather than slogans.

Module 14

Poultry on Veld

Poultry is the enterprise most often started before anyone checks whether the product can lawfully be sold. This module fixes that first, then designs a range birds will actually use, sizes the avian influenza risk with SAPA's own numbers, works the margins per bird placed, and dismantles the two most-repeated ecological claims using the primary literature.

Module 15

Ratites and the Other Birds

The ostrich industry gives this course three things: a stocking-rate controversy that shows what happens when an official guideline has no demonstrated basis, three chick-mortality levers a farmer can act on with a scale and a notebook, and an export disease architecture worth copying. The module closes on the birds nobody publishes data about, and two market warnings.

Module 16

Bees and Fish: the Enterprises Whose Capacity You Cannot See

An apiary site has a carrying capacity exactly as a camp does, and adding boxes does not create nectar. A pond has one too, and in most of inland South Africa winter closes it. This module teaches the bee law and the capensis catastrophe, the eucalyptus conflict and its permit-based resolution, honey standards and what an apiary honestly earns — then runs the fish decision to an evidence-based no.

Module 17

Game, Working Animals and Dogs

Everything on the farm that is not a conventional livestock enterprise but still eats grass, costs money or saves it. Game comes with its own ownership statute and a second capacity ledger. Predator control comes with evidence that killing predators can make things worse. Guardian dogs come with failure rates. And rabbits come with a warning rather than a budget.

Module 18

From Here to a Changed Year

The course ends where a farmer actually stands: with a shortlist, a fodder-flow shortfall, a lease, a wage bill and a compliance calendar. This module takes the baseline that cannot be captured retrospectively, decides which enterprises survive contact with everything taught since Module 1, orders the first year of change, finances it, diarises the law, and works one real Highveld property end to end.