A 300-year-old South African farm that was part of the old Cape Colony is helping farmers prepare for a future in which the area will be hotter and drier and water will be more scarce.

Goedgedacht, situated on the slopes of the Kasteelberg just 87km north west of Cape Town, was one of the first farms allocated to the “Free Burgers” in 1704. Today, the farm is a busy community development centre that is making a determined effort to deal with poverty and climate change by exploring, modeling and teaching solutions.

The Olive Peace Grove, its biggest, oldest, and most ambitious climate change project, began 15 years ago and now has 11,000 olive trees grown organically on just over 32 hectares. The profit from the olives, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, table olives, and real fruit vinegar dressings,  marketed under the Goedgedacht label, supports the Trust’s community projects. Thirty tons of olives were harvested in 2008 and 60 tons in 2007.

Olives offer a way for emerging black farmers to make a living as the climate gets hotter and drier, and already, 120 farmers belong to the Goedgedacht Olive Farmers Association. The Trust also is exploring alternative crops that are hardy enough for a hot and dry climate while giving farmers a quicker return on their time and energy.

The olive trees are just one of the ways that the trustees found to make the Goedgedacht Trust’s development work sustainable, when it was established in 1993. They also restored the farm’s beautiful old Cape Dutch buildings to create a 65 bedded venue for conferences, workshops, weddings, and retreats.

The Trust’s philosophy is to build people, strengthen community and promote democracy and shows itself on three different levels.

Nationally, the Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection keeps an eye on the fault lines in South African society by encouraging and promoting dialogue around issues of national importance, while a national climate change project is challenging middle and upper income South African households to reduce consumption and change the way they live by 90% by 2030.

On a regional level, three organizations working in the Swartland/West Coast that began at Goedgedacht farm are now operating successfully as independent organizations (The West Coast Community Foundation, the Goedgedacht Agricultural Resource Centre, and the Weskus Ubuntu Farmers Union). The Trust's olive farmers association and climate change crops project support the region’s small farmers by introducing them to crops which will thrive better in the region’s changing climate.

At a local level, the Trust’s “Path out of Poverty Programme” (POP) is successfully helping poor rural children find ways out of the desperate cycles of poverty that have trapped farm worker families for generations. The Path out of Poverty programme includes 17 projects linked by four strands - Education, Health, Personal Development, and Love for and Care of the Planet.

To celebrate POP’s 10^th anniversary, Goedgedacht has launched a new campaign to plant 10,000 more olive trees by 2018 in order to get 10,000 rural children on to the Path out of Poverty, from 10 POP youth centres. A donation of R300 (about US $40) will allow one tree to be planted.

This story was prepared from materials on the Goedgedacht Trust website. Contact the Trust at: 

Riebeeksrivier, Malmesbury, Western Cape, South Africa. Email 

All the pictures come from the Goedgedacht website, and show an aerial view of the farm (top); shown holding an olive tree is Shacquille Arendse, whose mother Mary Anne was one of the first young people to enter Goedgedacht's youth program in 1998, and who now works full-time as part of the Pre-school staff team (middle left); the Barn Conference Centre (middle right); and Goedgedacht farm (bottom left).