If You Hold Land
Your land. Our model, our people, and a package you can take to a funder.
This page is for a family with land, a chief or traditional authority, a community property association, a land-reform landholder, or a state landholder. Water rights and existing use are assets, not complications — bring them.
We are not taking ownership of your land. We are taking responsibility for the project on it.
Image outstanding
Soil testing on proposed land: a technician taking a core sample in an open field, bagging and labelling it, with the landholder standing alongside watching the sample go into the bag. Both parties present. This is the first real filter and the first shared commitment, and the picture should read as two people finding something out together.
The sequence
Ten steps, in order, with what each side has to do.
Nothing here is hidden until later. The cost you carry appears at step two, not at step nine.
Illustration of the sequence — not a quote, an offer or a contract
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Step one
Assessment
We come out and assess the land proposed for the project — a full feasibility against our production specification. Not a site visit and not a courtesy call: what will grow here, to what standard, at what scale, with what water.
You
Access to the land, and whatever you have on water rights, existing use, title or tenure.
Us
The assessment, at our cost, against a specification an international buyer has already set.
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Step two
Soil testing — at your cost
Said plainly and said early, because it is the first real filter. It is also the first shared commitment: the point at which both sides find out whether this is real, and the point at which we stop being a conversation.
You
The cost of the soil tests. The figure depends on the extent and the sampling required, and is established before you commit to it.
Us
Specifying what to test for, interpreting the results against organic and export requirements, and telling you honestly what they mean.
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Step three
Pre-contract, with a feasibility escape clause
If the land cannot carry the project to organic and export specification, the agreement ends there, cleanly. No obligation follows you out of it.
You
A pre-contract signed with an exit already written into it.
Us
A clear feasibility answer, and a clean end to it if the answer is no.
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Step four
Contract farming agreement
Land ownership never transfers. It stays with you. What is granted is a lease, a permission to occupy, or an equivalent right of use for the duration of the contract — because substantial assets are being invested into the ground and the project needs security of tenure to be fundable at all.
You
A right of use for the contract period. Your title, your land, unchanged.
Us
Responsibility for the project on it — build, operate, train, manage, buy — and a contract that says when each of those leaves our hands.
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Step five
The costed package
A full project assessment producing a document you can carry: what it costs, what it will produce, over what period, with what expected payback, and what the offtake will pay — including how that offtake price is expected to move across the contract period.
Every figure in the package is indicative, not an offer
You
Your asset details, and the decision about where to take the package.
Us
The assessment, the costing, the production model and the offtake terms, assembled into one document built to be read by a credit committee.
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Step six
Where you take it
The package is built to be bankable and portable. It goes to:
- The Department of Agriculture
- The Department of Rural Development
- The Land Bank — grant, loan, or blended
- Any other development finance institution
- Any corporate enterprise and supplier development, or environmental, social and governance programme
There are many development finance institutions mandated to fund exactly this borrower — black-owned land, with water rights, with feasibility. What funders told us is that the reason they hesitate is that farms fail. This package removes the reason for the no.
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Step seven
Who carries what — the honest split
The funding is raised in your name, for your asset. You carry that liability. We will work with you and help you raise it — but we are not liable for raising it.
And the reason we help:
If we sign with you, it is because we believe in the project, the land and you. Otherwise we are not involved.
You
The application in your name, and the liability that comes with it.
Us
The package, the production case, the offtake, the repayment commitment — and the work of getting it in front of the right funder.
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Step eight
Repayment
This is the point that makes the funding possible at all, so it is worth reading twice.
The funder is not being asked to trust the landholder's track record. The contract commits us to repaying the loan out of the farm's profits, under our financial management, for the full duration of the funding.
That commitment is also why financial management is the one function that cannot move across early. The constraint, and everything that does move, is on Sweat Equity.
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Step nine
Onboarding and delivery
We onboard the people, train them, and run them. Where they come from is its own page — and where the land comes from a community, the volunteer programme is opened to that whole community.
Billable items, including training and the community volunteer programme, are delivered as learnerships wherever possible, so that up to a meaningful portion of the cost is recoverable through the learnership tax incentives available to the employer — the employment tax incentive and the Section 12H learnership allowances.
No percentage is quoted here and none should be. What is actually recoverable depends on the project, the learners, the employer's tax position and the year. We run the actual arithmetic with your finance team.
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Step ten
Milestones
The route from here to ownership is already published, before you sign anything. Five tracks, each with its own defined milestone, each releasing its own slice of share and control — and first option on governance always to the original owners.
You do not have to take our word for what happens after the farm is working. It is on the site, in public, and it is the same for everyone.
What you end up with
The land, plus everything that was built on it.
- Your land
- Still yours. Ownership never transferred, and was never intended to.
- A developed asset
- Established production, certification held, infrastructure in the ground, and a long-term buyer already contracted.
- A meaningful share, from day one
- For the asset and for the risk you carry. Not on completion of anything. Mechanism only — no split is published.
- First option on governance
- Always to the original owners, with a clock on it defined in the contract. Take it or decline it; your share is unaffected either way.
- A working programme on your land
- Where the land came from a community, people from that community — those who performed in the volunteer programme — running it.
Start a conversation
Tell us about the land.
Nothing here commits you to anything, and there is no application to fill in. The first real step is the assessment, and that is a conversation before it is anything else.
If you do not know the extent, the water position or the tenure arrangement, say so — "not sure" is a real answer to every question below, and finding out is part of what the assessment is for.
What we do with this: it is recorded, it reaches the team directly, and it goes into our own client records. It is not sold, not shared with a third party and not used for anything else.