In Conversation with Luke Van Der Merwe from Alphonse Island

‘As the company expanded,’ Luke explains, ‘so did the farm, to suit the guest and hotel intake.’ When Luke says expanding, though, it’s worth providing a bit of context. Alphonse Island is tiny; a speck in the ocean, quite literally. And the farm, which has increased in size 4 times over since 2021, isn’t particularly big either. ‘It’s 4.8 hectares of land with a physical bed space of only 0.3 hectares.’ The pictures on the hotel website confirm this; in a carefully cut out clearing, flanked somewhat incongruously by palm trees, a dozen or so bullet straight beds have been created, lined up side by side with military precision.

If the physical farm is small, the results and vision of the project are anything but. In fact, this small farm, on this small island, is a bit of a marvel. ‘We’re currently doing 2.5 tonnes of produce a month, growing 56 separate products, harvesting twice a week throughout the year.’ I have to ask whether I heard the 56 figure correctly, which I did. This is just the farm’s second full season in its current, expanded guise, yet it’s already producing enough food to sustain as much as 70% of the hotel restaurant’s needs. The target is to get up to around 90%, which, given how Luke and the team – ‘phenomenal, all of them’ – are tracking, seems more than achievable.

To understand the farm’s output, you need to appreciate the thinking behind it. ‘Organic is a greenwashed word,’ Luke says, ‘it’s lost its meaning.’ The farm on Alphonse is regenerative in the word’s purest sense. Forget chemical inputs and oil sprays. Forget tractors – ‘cold metal’ – and monocultures. Luke sees himself as a custodian of the land, someone for whom bio-friendly farming practices are less box-ticking exercise, more a way of life. He is insanely knowledgeable about his trade, rattling off granular stats about crop output whilst also speaking fluently – and passionately – about the farming industry on a much wider scale.

‘Much of modern farming is short term,’ he says, ‘it’s about convenience and instant gratification.’ He cites mass spraying and fertilising as a good example of this, which may produce crops almost instantaneously, but does nothing for regenerating the land. There’s also an inefficiency associated with a lot of contemporary practices, something which Luke and the team have been keen to avoid. ‘We’ve brought in something called drip irrigation, which means that, even though we’re 4 times the size, we’re using half as much water.’ The ethos extends to the way in which the farm fits into the wider hotel, too, with kitchen waste, cuttings and leaves produced around the site, cardboard and more all sent over to Luke, who goes about turning it into compost. For this, he has extra help. ‘What kid doesn’t love a machine that takes this stuff and turns it into compost?’ Luke asks, ‘so we run tours where that happens and the result is that every bed receives as much as 4 tonnes of compost a year.’ It’s a closed cycle, the Alphonse farm, a neat loop of produce and recycled material fed back into the land to generate more.

If farming is a science, this is where it gives way to a bit of art. ‘The way we farm is a more honest interaction with the land,’ explains Luke, ‘we’re trying to honour the natural elements.’ It’s why they don’t use things like hydroponics, which would certainly produce fast results but which involve a high chemical input. ‘The way I explain it to guests, many of whom love fishing, is by asking them whether they’d fly fish in an aquarium. Yes, you’d get the fish, but how would it feel?’ Gone, too, is the idea of a monoculture. Firstly, because it doesn’t align with the vision on Alphonse but also, simply, the restaurant needs more than one type of produce. Also, on a purely financial level, polyculture farming is cheaper and, given that all your eggs are spread over several baskets, the failure of one crop is less disastrous than it would be for monoculture farmers.

I mentioned earlier that Luke and the team harvest twice, every single week. That’s because the food for the restaurant needs to be fresh and it means, too, that there is generation upon generation of produce already at the farm. ‘We’re already on generation 22 of Chinese cabbage,’ Luke laughs, ‘because it grows so fast. We have a system that is linked to the cycles of the earth and to the weather, which is a humbling thought.’ Luke uses that word – ‘humbling’ – a lot and it seems to me that the connection he has to the land, and to the people who he works with and for, is profound.