The History of the Farm

Although the farm was first officially registered in 1883, the history of the land being used for food goes back at least 100.000 years. This is the story of how our farm became the "garden" of the earliest humans.
In 1991 a cave was found in our seaside village, Stilbaai, which became famous as the "Blombos Cave". This cave and its contents showed that people with a complex social and economic society lived in this area from at least 100.000 years ago. Subsequently more caves were found along the coastline up to Mosselbay, confirming the presence of humans from 120.000 years ago. These initial people, an initial group of around 600 individuals, who survived a harsh icy world, are the ancestors of all other human beings on this planet. (so yes, your 4000 generations great grandma was of local origin)

These amazing discoveries have started a wide-range of new research from universities around the world trying to analyze how these people lived and survived. One of those aspects was obviously their diet. And that is when Infinity Farm became a place of research. In 2014 we were asked by the Nelson Mandela University whether we were willing to let a research team harvest and measure edible flower bulbs over a 3 year period. The reason for this request was because our farm contains a 12 hectare portion of prime land that never has been "cultivated" and still harbors the original natural environment. This land is the only remaining original environment of a very specific ecosystem within the overall Fynbos environment: Resiesbaan Renosterveld. 

The results of the studies have started to appear in the scientific journals and some of the observations are quite different to what one would suspect. Let's have a look at some of these amazing discoveries.

* On average 1 hectare of Renosterveld contains 3 tons of edible bulbs with caloric values between 40 up to 224 calories per 100 gram. (141 calories on average) In other words, 1 hectare of Renosterveld provides enough calories to feed 186 people for a day!

* An adult human on average needs to spend less than 2 hours to collect enough calories for the day! (that's 22 hours a day free time!!)

* Although the perception exists that if you remove the bulbs, you remove it forever, the 3 year harvesting shows a different picture. When carefully manually removed, enough plant material remains to allow the plant to regrow. And this is quite important. The landscape provides an infinity source of food when managed correctly!

Although the scientific research on our farm focused solely on the Underground Storage Organs, the above ground vegetation shows a world with a focus on human nutrition.
But this does not make it a garden though. So what have they found that changes it from a natural environment, from which food was gathered, into a garden? Well there are some very strong indications that this "natural environment" is too good to be true.
More than 60% of all the bulbous plants in the area have nutritional value for humans and another 20% is assumed to have but this hasn't been confirmed yet. As the bulbous plants dominate in this ecosystem, representing the majority of all plants, we are observing an ecosystem where the amount of plants that directly benefit humans is so high that it no longer reflects other natural environments. While around the world, on average between 2 and 4 percent of plants in nature were used as food for humans, a jump from 3 to nearly 80% is the strongest indication that we are dealing with something special.
Plants evolve and adapt to changing environments so after 100.000 years it is normally very unlikely that you will see the same plants return when researching food. Comparing modern harvest with food remains from 80.000 years ago shows a remarkable resemblance, indicating that these plants might have been "cultivated" and thus protected from natural evolution.
Research has also shown that in areas where wildfires cleared the above ground vegetation, the bulbous plants thrived and had higher nutritional values. It is assumed that these early people developed specific strategies with fire to create "nutritional" hotspots (thus gardens). Once you start talking about land management to create better food for humans, it is no longer just nature. It now has become a farm, a garden or a park. A place where humans had intricate design views on the entire landscape.
So, although we learned that people started farming about 12.000 years ago, all these recent discoveries point in the direction that we have always farmed our food but in a smarter way than we do today. One study refers to these early humans as "ecological masterminds".
It is Infinity Farm's primary mission to protect, preserve and restore this piece of history.