Every yard starts with a foundation. Ours started with a farm.
Where it started
My grandfather was a dairy farmer, and when I think back to my childhood, the time I spent on his farm is some of the most precious memories I have. Long before I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I already knew what it felt like to belong to a farm.
The long way round
My career didn't start on a farm — it started on a factory floor. I trained as a Bridgestone tire technician, monitoring tire performance in the mining sector, before qualifying as an NDT specialist in UT and Phased Array inspection. I spent five years building myself into someone the company trusted enough to send around the world on refinery projects. I was good at it. But working on refineries was never my calling.
Finding the calling
An opportunity came up to manage a broiler chicken farm, raising 400,000 birds a cycle. That was the moment I felt it — the pull of producing food for the country. But being a manager wasn't enough; I wanted to feel like I was building something, not just running something someone else had built.
So I went to the United States and worked on a commercial cattle feedlot, learning the systems a big feed yard runs on, the best practices, the standards you hold every single day whether anyone's watching or not. That experience is what sent me looking for the opportunity back home that became Dorco Boerdery.
Farming isn't a job — it's a lifestyle.
South African farmers are some of the hardest-working people in the world. Even when the economy, the government, and the country in general seem to be working against them, they don't quit — they make a success of the farm, because the country needs to eat.
You can't clock in at seven and clock out at five and expect everything to be fine the next morning. There's weather, illness, and a hundred things you never saw coming, all wanting your attention at once. But once you see yourself as the caretaker of the farm — the way a father is to his own — and you honour the position you've been given to look after the animals and work the earth, it stops being work. It's just what your heart does.
Why Dorco Boerdery exists
I'm an entrepreneur, but I hope I'm also a caring, giving hand with a heart for South Africa and for the farmers who keep it fed. I started this business to help grow the farmers in my own community and, in time, hopefully across the nation. Everything about how Dorco Boerdery is built — from the joint venture with a local farmer partner, to leaning on the Suidwes and farmer networks around Leeudoringstad — comes back to that.
Getting the foundation right
We're starting small, deliberately. Before we can grow into a massive, industry-leading operation, we need to get the foundation right. That's the goal I'm building toward: for Dorco Boerdery to be known as the biggest feedyard in the southern region, run on industry-leading best practices and award-winning procedures. Every step from here is taken with that in mind.