Afrikaaner farmers
in Georgia.
On this page I have posted the good, the bad and the ugly.
The fact is that you can buy smaller working farms from 5 to15 acres reasonably easily and have them registered into your name. This normally means that they have to be re-zoned as residential or commercial. Larger farms can be owned through a company with Georgian shareholding. -
The other way is to rent or lease the farmland from a Georgian citizen or from the government. 99 year leases can be negotiated for private land and government leases can be attained for 25 years.
This all can be done and our legal team can handle the contracts for you.
You could buy one or two small holdings and then lease the larger acreage from either a private Georgian owner or the local government. These contracts once signed - are set in stone.
FOR EXAMPLE:
When you are buying a 10 acre farm with 500+ macadamia nut trees and a 300 square meter double story house (furnished) and out buildings for around R250,000 -You can afford to buy a few and renovate and purchase new machinery.
Skilled labor is available and cheap and the hiring & firing staff is easy and simple.(click here to read more)
If you are considering canning, processing, drying or value adding to the farmed produce and employing locals, you will be given assistance by the government and authorities to grow your business.
We can help you to get government grants and we can provide loans based on your business-farming plan.
Let us know what type of farming you are interested in and we will help you find the best land for those purposes. We have local farming/agricultural experts to help guide you in Georgia. We are always happy to set up meetings with local farmers and the department of agriculture & local municipalities in the various regions to help you secure your land and your investment.
History Of South African Farming in Georgia
Sandra Roelofs, the Dutch-born wife of Georgian Former President Mikhail Saakashvili, has promoted a program encouraging Afrikaans South African farmers to migrate to Georgia.
The country is actively recruiting Afrikaner farmers to help revive the nation's moribund agriculture. In the 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, half of Georgia's farmland has gone out of production.
Piet Kemp (66), an Afrikaner farmer from Mpumalanga, South Africa, inspects baby maize at his new home in Sartichala, eastern Georgia, on July 28, 2011. Georgia recruited South African farmers to invigorate their dwindling agricultural sector, believing that Georgian farmers will also gain experience from the newcomers.
The Kemps and 9 other Afrikaner families reacted positively to the Georgian recruitment campaign, being influenced by South Africa's high crime levels, lack of land security and threats coming from the ANC's youth leader, Julius Malema.
Kemp formerly assisted South African farmers in labor disputes and during land invasions.
Although owning Georgian farmland is now reserved for Georgians, you can still own the ground as a company with local shareholding or you can simply lease the ground on a long term lease.
These leases can be entered into with private land owners or government/municipal entities.
When Georgia invited
South African farmers to
revive its agriculture
sector
According to Georgia’s former Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development Vera Kobalia, the initiative was heavily influenced by then-president Mikheil Saakashvili’s Dutch wife, Sandra Roelofs – Afrikaans, the language spoken by the Boers, has substantial similarities with Dutch.
While there are no official statistics ad to the exact number of Boers who have made the journey, according to boers.ge, a website set up by the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa, Boers currently own about 10 per cent of arable land in Georgia. Jam-news, a news site focusing on the Caucasus, estimated that as of 2016, there were many South African families now living in Georgia.
By all accounts, the settlers have acclimatized well to their new surroundings.
Over 40 per cent (closer to 50%) of the Georgian population still lives in rural areas, relatively underdeveloped compared to the rest of the country.
The backlash
In 2017 and 2018, the Georgian government passed legislation severely limiting the sale of agricultural land to foreigners.
This has restricted new migration from South Africa – According to the Transvaal Agricultural Union, there have been no new land purchases by South Africans since 2017.
Although the program has largely now been brought to a halt, it was around long enough for a decent sized South African community to form in Georgia.
However, it is possible to lease land or to set up a company and take on partners.
Today, the Boers are just one of the myriad peoples living in the Caucasus.
And unlike your run of the mill expat community – they don’t plan on returning home anytime soon.
The Du Preez family in Gardabani. Photo: Davit Pipia, JAMnews
Starting from 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa, marking the end of apartheid, many descendants of European colonists began leaving the country to seek a safer life elsewhere.
Some of them have found a new home in Georgia. In June 2017, JAMnews journalists visited a family of Boers living in the Georgian region of Kvemo Kartli.
“We don’t want to go back,” says Adri confidently as we park our car and continue our journey in her off-roader.
The muddy road leads to a farmhouse, 64 km south of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, and 14 km away from the nearest town, Gardabani. This is the new home for Adri Du Preez, her husband and their two teenagers who left South Africa two years ago to find peace, friendly people and fertile soil for their ‘agricultural experiments’.
“Some people might say that coming to Georgia is ‘escaping’, but it’s a decision we made because it is about progress,” says Adri, 41.
“You can see the progress in Georgia, and people welcome you with open arms, while in South Africa, it’s not the case anymore.”
BOER FARMERS
The Du Preez family is one of many Boer or Afrikaner families – South Africa’s original white settlers – who have fled their homes to escape ruthless attacks, as the end of apartheid in the early 1990s entailed a growing racial confrontation, violence and crime.
Distant ancestors of the Du Preez’s were from Holland, France, Scotland and Germany, though they currently have no relatives in Europe.
On the outskirts of Gardabani, a town of around 11 000 people, we drive through a run-down neighbourhood which under Soviet control was a shining military townlet inaccessible to outsiders. The Du Preez family drives along this ghostly-looking area when they go shopping in Gardabani, Tbilisi, or any place for that matter.
After driving among the green, flat, agricultural fields with steppe-like landscapes around it, the vehicle arrives at a courtyard with no single tree or shade. The contours of some factory pipes on the horizon is the background for the family’s makeshift home, consisting of two containers and a small, single-story house nestled in-between.
“This is just a cabin so that we can stay somewhere,” says Gerrie Ignatius Du Preez, 46, Adri’s husband. They have planted dozens of various types of trees and plan to build a big house later.
New life in Gardabani, Georgia
Once a touristic destination for the Du Preezs and now their home village, Lemshveniera has approximately 1 600 inhabitants and is part of the Gardabani Municipality in the Kvemo Kartli region of southern Georgia.
Bordering Azerbaijan to the South, this municipality has a mixed population, of which 44% are ethnic Azerbaijanis who are mostly engaged in farming, animal husbandry and beekeeping.
In this area with its long hot summers and cold winters, the Du Preezs bought nine hectares of land. They may also cultivate the adjacent land of about 12 hectares until they ‘get enough money to buy it’.
There are nine Boer families living in Georgia in total, says the Du Preezs. Three of them are based in Lemshveniera.
According to the Gardabani municipality’s press office, the Boers in Lemshveniera own approximately 1 000 hectares of agricultural land in total, employ around ten people, and sell their harvest in the Black Sea coastal city of Batumi and neighbouring Turkey. They mostly grow maize, wheat and barley.
The Boers came to faraway Georgia in response to the Georgian government’s invitation that aimed to boost the struggling agriculture sector through hard-working, agriculturally experienced Boers.
Almost half of Georgia’s 3.7 million people are employed in agriculture. However, the sector gets the lowest share of investment and contributes just little more than 9% to the GDP.
According to the 2015 data of the World Bank, output per agricultural worker in Georgia stands at a modest USD 3 345, while a South African farmer yields three times more.
The Georgian government, led by the United National Movement party, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TLU SA), a union of commercial farmers, in 2010. Group visits of Boers to Georgia’s countryside followed, where the authorities presented the business-friendly environment and low crime rate.
“Some of our South African neighbours participated in a tour organized by TLU SA,” Adri recalls. “Through them we heard about Georgia and then Gerrie did some research. One of our neighbours moved here permanently with his family, and we came to visit them in October 2013 for a two-week trip.”
In South Africa, the Du Preezs lived in a big old rented house with a two-hectare piece of land located eight kilometres away from Bethal, a farming town in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, which borders Swaziland and Mozambique. With its farms mostly producing maize, sunflower seeds, rye and sorghum, Bethal has a population of around 61 000, with only 13% being white.
Adri and Ignis Du Preez on their Lavender field in Gardabani Municipality. Photo: Agnieszka Zielonka, JAMnews
Early summer is harvesting time for lavender, the main product made by the Du Preez family. The fresh purple bushes line the area beautifully.
While Georgians are largely unfamiliar to lavender’s multiple benefits, farmers in many countries produce lavender essential oil, well-known for its antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and soothing properties as well as other culinary herbs to add floral and slightly sweet flavours to dishes.
“It’s healthy, very good for babies and even adults with breathing problems, as well as sleeping problems,” Adri explains. Creams, soups, teas and even sugar can be made of lavender. Flowers are also sought after as dry arrangements.
They currently have 500 lavender bushes and plan to have about 10 000 per hectare once they have fully developed the farm. “In about five years from now, we will probably have about five to six hectares of lavender, and that’s a fairly good business to have,” Gerrie says.
According to him, the international price per millilitre of lavender oil can reach USD 300, depending on quality. On average, each plant gives about 10-20ml of oil.
Last year, the Du Preezs produced about 400ml of oil and sold ten bottles for 25 lari (USD 10) per 10ml bottle. The rest was just given away as gifts so that people could experience it.
A thermometer placed in the ground checks soil temperature to signal when the lavender bushes need water.
Gerrie thinks the way people in Georgia cultivate land is old-fashioned compared to South Africa. “We are used to being very much mechanized,” he says.
