Chartwell’s soil doctor in action
GEO-ENGINEERING: PUTTING THE LOST CARBON BACK
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about even though we live here.
Outside the forest-tobe, we’re inside a dam about to have breakfast. Babur is making toast from Turkish bread. There’s cheese to eat with it and his homemade pale tomato sauce in a little bowl.
This was one of those round farm dams that Babur has turned into a fantastic house with a high thatched interior.
I’ve come to meet a truly organic farmer in Chartwell, northwest of Johannesburg next to Dainfern.
He supplies some vegetables to Debbie Logan, the Real Food R/Evolution person. “It’s turning out that he’s a photographer and an engineer, having worked at Secunda, producing oil from coal. And also an imaginer. I’m beginning to see a pattern. His walls feature photographs of his time in Cuba, an organically farmed country.
In the centre of the room is a chandelier skeleton covered in ostrich feathers.
Above a counter are three pendant lights shaded by three glitter Homburg-shaped party hats.
Heather and I arrived for sunrise pictures. The sun is up.
We’re drinking Turkish tea, but realise we should hurry. Babur throws on overalls. The neighbour’s dog accompanies us into the fields.
We look around the grasslands and Babur tells us he’s developing an organic food forest. “The ground was so hard the pick used to bounce back at me,” he laughs.
He’s on his knees scooping up loamy soil full of earthworms. “Now it’s like butter.” Babur’s been feeding the soil in a succession of trenches going down the slope with burnt wood and cardboard.
The engineer in him is aware that deforestation and industrialisation, heavy fertilisers and pesticides ruin soil fast and strip it of carbon.
He’s working on the principle that geo-engineering can be used to reverse it with regenerative farming but the soil must be rebuilt first.
“Apples, oranges, a walnut tree”… he has a few waiting in bags. “Chestnuts in between blueberries and shrubs, ponds, indigenous herbs, strawberries, birds and butterflies.
“It’ll be a nice place to come and read a book, maybe eat vegetables.”
In the next field, in tunnels, also sewn permaculture style, he already has flourishing veggies.
I now know Babur Yakar will have an organic food forest outside this window in the dam wall.
For more information visit