A Delta Farms field course · South Africa
Regenerative Animal Husbandry
A South African field course in raising animals that build land. Every animal we farm here — from Nguni cattle on the Highveld to Angora goats in the Karoo, pastured layers, Kolbroek pigs, ostriches, bees and farmed game — taught against real South African veld, real South African law, and real South African numbers.
- Lessons
- 92
- Modules
- 18
- Study time
- 21 hr
- Species covered
- 29
Why this course exists
Most livestock advice was written for someone else's rain
South Africa is not a wet country pretending to be dry. It is a genuinely variable one — a place where the long-term average rainfall figure describes a year that almost never actually happens. Grazing systems designed for Missouri or the Waikato quietly assume a reliability our veld does not have, and farmers who import them wholesale find out in the third year, when the rain does not come and the fodder bank is a spreadsheet rather than a shed.
This course teaches regenerative animal husbandry the way it has to work here: on sourveld that loses its protein in April, in a country where ticks and their diseases are a permanent feature rather than an outbreak, under legislation that decides where your animals may walk and where your meat may be sold, and into markets that pay for what they can verify. It takes the regenerative principles seriously and takes the criticism of them seriously too — because a farmer who is sold certainty they cannot bank is worse off than one who was told the truth.
The curriculum
18 modules, built to be worked through in order
Foundations first — because a stocking-rate decision made without understanding your veld is a guess no matter how good your genetics are. Then every animal in turn, then the business that has to survive around them.
Reading the Land You Actually Have
Before you choose an animal, learn to read the ground it will stand on — and find out what you do not yet know about your own place.
Soil and Water: The Engine Under the Grass
South African soils are not overseas soils. What carbon really does here, how soil form forecasts water, and what to look at without a laboratory.
The Grazing Ledger
Capacity, stocking rate, stocking density and stock days per hectare are four different numbers. The arithmetic, the legal table, and your own veld score.
Recovery, Density and the Contested Evidence
Recovery period is the design variable. Density is contested. This module steelmans both sides of the AMP argument before a single animal is discussed.
Fire, Bush and Pasture
Fire is a tool with three legal legs. Bush encroachment is a statutory duty. Planted pasture is a real fight with principle two.
The Fodder Flow and the Drought Plan
The winter protein collapse is SA's dominant seasonal constraint and its biggest cost line. Budget it, and write the drought trigger before you need it.
Animal Health as an Ecological Problem
Endemic stability, refugia and resistance are one connected argument. Taught once, here, so no species module has to repeat it.
The Law of the Land and the Animal
The abattoir rule, the movement drill, the compulsory measures, your duties to the land, and what you may lawfully call your product.
The Money
Three profit equations, three denominators, and one cost line that is three-quarters of your variable spend — plus how to rebuild a budget that is wrong.
Cattle: The Big Grazer
What a cow does to veld and what veld does to a cow — the veld-adapted cow argument, the breeding season, the winter lick, the grid, and pasture dairy's flashpoint.
Sheep: Wool, Mutton and the Predation Problem
A second income stream, a parasite protocol that starts with grazing height, a controlled disease that binds any person, and a real place-based premium.
Goats: Browse, Fibre and Cold
Goats are sized on browse, not ha/LSU. Angoras are killed by weather, not husbandry. And the meat you may not sell, you may sell alive.
Pigs: Rooting, Law and the Grid
A tillage tool with a hard legal fence around its feed, a disease with no vaccine, and a grading grid that pays least for the best bacon.
Poultry on Veld
The law decides your enterprise before the chick arrives — then a range birds will not use, a disease that ends businesses, and thin margins.
Ratites and the Other Birds
Ostriches are infrastructure-locked, not just climate-locked — and their disease compartment system is the best worked example any farmer can borrow.
Bees and Fish: the Enterprises Whose Capacity You Cannot See
Two enterprises whose carrying capacity you cannot walk out and look at — nectar flow and water temperature. Both punish a farmer who assumes.
Game, Working Animals and Dogs
Game is a second legal property class with its own ledger. Dogs are the best-evidenced predator tool in SA. Donkeys are infrastructure. Rabbits have no lawful route.
From Here to a Changed Year
A baseline, an enterprise decision, a first-year plan that does not break the farm, the money to pay for it, and a calendar that keeps it legal.
How this course is built
Sourced, adjudicated, and honest about what we don't know
South African by default
Veld types, grazing capacity norms, breeds, parasites, notifiable diseases, Acts and market channels are all local. Where an overseas practice does not transfer to our conditions, the course says so plainly.
Contested where it is contested
Soil-carbon claims and the AMP-grazing evidence base are argued about by serious people. You get the strongest version of both cases, not a sales pitch.
Legally grounded
Every rule that constrains what you may do with an animal is named — the Act, the number, the year — so you can look it up rather than take our word for it.
Costed
Practices come with what they cost and what they return, in Rands, dated, so you can tell an investment from an aspiration.
Start with the ground under the animals
The first module is the one everything else stands on. It takes about 77 minutes.
Begin — Land First: Why the Ground Comes Before the Animal