Backsberg

Last Saturday morning, I headed off to the nearby village Klapmuts to help plant some trees. Not just any trees, mind you. We have been working with our UK Importer, Ellis of Richmond, to assist them in becoming carbon neutral. After undergoing a carbon audit in the UK, Ellis is offsetting its emissions by planting trees both in Klapmuts as well as on Backsberg.

I met Lucky at the Klapmuts Sports Centre, along with 400 indigenous trees standing to attention. Lucky works for the NGO, Food and Trees for Africa (FTFA), who was facilitating the tree-planting program. FTFA had run three workshops prior to the Saturday where they had trained up a number of community-based educators (CBEs) to help inform the recipients of the trees on how to plant and look after them. The CBEs were themselves unemployed members of the Klapmuts community.

Armed with trees and shovels we headed out.  Trees were not handed out casually. Buy-in from the members of the community is critical to the success of the project. Therefore, if community members wanted trees for their respective gardens, they had to get involved in the process of planting them. The educators informed community members on how to take care of the trees, providing them with diagrams detailing a maintenance regime. A strict recording process was also applied, where the tree’s address was noted. This way there is a blueprint for following up on the health status of the trees and ensuring they are looked after.

Backsberg has taken a gate-to-gate-to-gate philosophy on taking account of and offsetting carbon emissions. So, we consider the emissions impact of transport of inputs from the gate of our suppliers, for example, bottles from Consol glass to the farm, to all the processes of production on the farm, to the shipping of wine to the gate of our importers, for example, in the UK. Now that Ellis has offset its emissions due to sales, distribution and other business processes, restaurant goers in and around central London are buying into a totally Carbon Neutral bottle of wine.

SB

P.S. Above is a picture of an elderly gentleman who had come to pick up his tree at the Klapmuts Sports Centre.

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This post was written by:

Simon Back- who has written 56 posts on the Back Chat Blog. After finishing up studying economics at UCT in 2007, Simon has joined his family wine farm, Backsberg. When he is not trying to figure out what marketing wine means, he is authoring his blog, Back Chat.

Author's web site: Backsberg

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