Anthony Evans: Rhodes scholar, top farmer, agribusiness pioneer

1942-2016

ANTHONY Evans, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 73, was a Rhodes scholar, one of South Africa’s top farmers and a pioneer of the local agribusiness industry.

His methods were ahead of their time and commanded the attention of even National Party government diehards who fancied they knew a thing or two about farming.

At least one Nat minister of agriculture came to his farm in Viljoenskroon in the northern Free State to see what he was doing and ask for advice.

Evans was born in Durban on December 6 1942. He matriculated at Michaelhouse in KwaZuluNatal, where he was head boy, and went to Rhodes University, where he achieved a first class BA in Latin and law.

He intended going to Cambridge University but was awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 1964 and read politics, philosophy and economics at Trinity College, Oxford, instead.

After doing an MBA at Harvard Business School in the US he joined his father, Rhys, on the family farm, Huntersvlei.

He was fired up with new economic theories he’d learnt at Harvard and full of ideas about how to modernise the operation and turn it into a major agribusiness. His father, who had been running the farm quite successfully since returning from World War 2, was not convinced.

Powerful personalities both, they soon came to blows about the way forward.

In 1972 Evans was about to leave to pursue further studies and a different career when his father died and he became CEO of the Rhys Evans Group, which his father had started.

Evans, who combined a shrewd intellect with sharp business acumen, saw himself as a business executive rather than a farmer. He relied on first-class farm managers to do the actual farming while he was absorbed by the business aspects. He spent more time at his desk and later in front of his computer than in the fields.

Studying and implementing modern farming methods was his passion. This included an approach to his OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD: Free State farmer Anthony Rhys Evans applied the theory he learnt in his Harvard MBA to agribusiness workers that was revolutionary in the South Africa of the time. He understood that a good business depended on contented and motivated staff and liaised with them frequently.

He employed a nursing sister on the farm and ran a good primary school for the children of his workers, which was one of the first and best of its kind in the district. He paid the salaries and provided accommodation for six teachers.

He built good houses with hot and cold running water and electricity at a time when for most farmworkers this was unheard of.

When they chose to have houses in the adjoining township instead, he helped them get money from the government’s reconstruction and development programme to build them. He added funds from his own pocket, helped pay for infrastructure and ensured they got the title deeds to their houses.

He enthusiastically embraced land reform and the notion that farmworkers should have a stake in the farming operation. He had a clear vision of how sustainable reform could work and developed different models to support it.

It was largely an exercise in frustration. He received scant support from the government, which he found severely dispiriting.

He was also disappointed by the lack of support from the commercial banks. He felt they were not nearly as proactive as they should have been in assisting the country with an agricultural reform programme.

As a former director of Standard Bank and chairman of the bank in the Free State for a number of years, his views on the matter were typically well informed.

Evans responded to the deregulation of the agricultural market in the early ’90s — which wiped out many previously cosseted farmers suddenly exposed to globally determined prices — by diversifying away from primary agricultural production.

He reduced his farm from around 8 000ha to 3 500, relying on modern methods of precision farming, crop rotation and conservation (no-tilling)

He embraced the notion that farm workers should have a stake in the operation

agriculture rather than size.

He farmed mostly maize, soya beans, sunflowers and groundnuts, which he exported mainly to Japan and Germany after buying a processing and shelling plant.

He selected and bred some of the finest Sussex cattle in the country. He had a herd of 250 cows for breeding and around 60 breeding-age Sussex bulls. He sold about 40 a year at auction. One went for the record South African price of R200 000 just days before Evans died.

He built up a 5 000-strong piggery and bought an abattoir in Viljoenskroon.

Evans was South Africa’s farmer of the year in 1983 and in 2013 the Rhys Evans Group won Grain South Africa’s grain producer of the year award.

He was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for services to agriculture by the University of Pretoria.

Evans, who was diagnosed with bile duct cancer last year, is survived by his wife, Jane, and four children. — Chris Barron