The compiler

February 2013

“So, Macaskill, what’s it like to see a mountain?”

At boarding school I never understood the jokes about the Free State, my home province, being flat. The farm on which I grew up was bordered by mountains, and the Maluti mountain range was an indisputable fact to the east! (Yes, yes, those are in neighbouring Lesotho, but the geography of the Eastern Free State reflects the swell that leads to the “Mountain kingdom”).

My father, like his father and his father before him, ran a mixed operation here: the usual grain crops (maize, wheat, sunflowers), potatoes and livestock (dairy, beef, sheep). He tried his hand at other things too. Millet was a favourite (sold largely for birdseed), oats and at one stage one of the largest lands was covered with pumpkins! We had some orchards, the fruit being mainly for home consumption. I recall throwing apricots with my cousins and brothers at the aeroplane spraying the neighbour’s land but I don’t think the pilot even noticed.

There were chickens and geese, and for a very short while, turkeys (this venture ended following the turkey chieftan's fatal encounter with my father, whom he pounced on as the man lay fixing an implement behind a tractor).

I loved life on the farm, but my calling lay elsewhere, and after years of teaching, I have ended up back with agriculture, as the editor of The Agri Handbook for South Africa.