Plow

The COVID-19 pandemic has put many hardships at the doors of South Africans, but it has also resulted in wonderful initiatives of charity and caring. Atterbury Trust is very grateful that we were able to get involved in a project that provides some of the most vulnerable communities in Pretoria with much needed meals, together with the founder who is also a good friend of Atterbury. We went to entrepreneur and businessman Lood Bester to light a candle about Backplough, and the “Help that Works” why the concept was built. What is Backplough exactly, and where did the idea come from? The idea was born in conversations with my friend Herman Marx, when during the confinement we became aware of the enormous food need in certain Afrikaans-speaking communities and that no help was made available to them. We are both businessmen, and wanted to help. Food was purchased, which we then distributed ourselves in some of these communities around us. We went to knock on the door of our farmer friends and shared our ideas with them, everyone immediately agreed to donate food for us. For example, we send one of Herman’s trucks to a farm, which then fills our donors with between 3 and 8 tons of vegetables or fruit, and it is then unloaded at Herman’s company, Vibro Bricks, in Pretoria. The food is divided into smaller portions, the bowls loaded, and further distributed among old age homes, orphanages and schools we have identified, where there is a specific food shortage.

And from this spontaneous start during Level 5 of the restraint, your activities have greatly expanded. Please tell us more. Yes, things have steamrollered as we have gotten more people and institutions involved, and the dream of making a significant difference in people’s lives is now taking shape with Return Plow. To sum it up, Backplow is a network of benefactors whose donations are managed responsibly to first provide food to vulnerable Afrikaans communities and fight hunger. But we have a bigger dream – that it becomes a sustainable project that also provides jobs to people from these communities, so that we can give them hope again, and possibly a step further – towards a better future. It does not help to just feed people; you want to give hope, respect, skills and opportunities so that it can lead to a better life.

How did Atterbury get involved and who are the other companies donating their time or resources to keep the project going? A month or so after we started with this, a conversation with our friend Louis van der Watt of Atterbury led to the formalization of Return Plow as part of the Atterbury Trust. The benefit of the commitment is that the Trust has more than two decades of experience in charity project administration, as well as the infrastructure to effectively manage such return projects, and the reputation for reliability and transparency. In the meantime, we have added more and more benefactors who contribute regularly. There are people like the lawyer from Pretoria who donate R50 000 every month for food; farmers from across the country, to large insurance companies and banks; but we still remain grateful to the individuals who have only R100 extra available, but would like to donate it. We soon realized that we needed a well-equipped and easily accessible premises so that we could receive large quantities of food at once, process it if necessary, and store it until we wanted to distribute it. We have found that when it comes to nutrition programs, the continuity of a plate of food every other day is far more important than a whole truckload of food being unloaded at once at someone who lives in a Wendy cottage – without a refrigerator. If a farmer donates some cattle, we need to be able to process them into minced meat, and store them so that we can selectively distribute them where needed. We are infinitely grateful to Faan and Dirk van der Walt, the founders of WeBuyCars, who rolled that big obstacle out of the way by making available to us eight hectares of land in the east of Pretoria – on the N4, near the Rayton off-ramp. . We can now use it for free to establish a Head Office for Backplow. We are very excited to announce that we will be starting construction in early January 2021, and thanks to our bond with Atterbury, we have development and construction assistance. We are also very grateful to AJ Smit of Palin Smit Architects who acted as our architect and to Matla Quantity Surveyors, who offered to do the quantity surveying work for free.

What are you all aiming for on the new Backplow site? In addition to the food processing facility and cold storage, we are also going to plant vegetable and fruit gardens, we want to start a clothing bank, we plan to cut firewood and pack it for sale. All of these features require hands; to take care of the gardens, to process the food, to sort, wash and iron the clothes we get in, to pack the loads of wood in braai packs… with this we want to create jobs for the people from the communities we serve. I have developed as Back Plow, first hand how much respect there is within a poor community for people who are lucky enough to have a job, no matter how modest. Our hope is to give more people this opportunity, to work together on a project that benefits their own community, to earn their own human dignity and respect. We also aim to set up a lecture hall in the building, in which we want to present courses and talks, to inspire both school children and adults, and to give practical advice and training so that they can also improve their circumstances.

And when will it all kick off? We want to officially open the Return Plow facility by May next year, but in the meantime we continue to informally collect and distribute food. We are very excited about the agreement we have just made with GROOTfm and GROOTOntbyt – as our official media partner they will help any campaign we launch get airtime and coverage to tell our story more broadly.

What does the future hold for Backplow – what do you have in mind? Look, we started in Pretoria because that’s where we are, and the community we are currently helping is mostly Afrikaans, because that’s the demographics here, but there’s no reason why Backplow can not be rolled out to other areas and other demographics. . As things develop and our networks and experience grow, we indeed hope to establish branches elsewhere in the country as well.

If people want to get involved or make a contribution, how do they do it? I just want to mention again that we welcome ALL contributions; whether it’s a bag of old clothes or shoes or toys; a cash check; five sheep; a load of pumpkins; or a meat truck and a car, as WeBuyCars recently donated. We receive all donations and find the best way to use them, and you can be sure that your donation will come from the right place – we can give an account to everyone who entrusts something to us. As we will soon be starting the construction of the Backplow Building, donations in the form of construction materials will also be welcomed – bricks and cement, rolling doors, carpets, air conditioners, kitchen equipment, meat processing machinery… The list is long! Later we will welcome people who want to offer their services as trainers, counselors and more. Also people who can offer extra maths, science or accounting lessons to school children. We can also issue an 18A tax certificate for all donations through Atterbury Trust, to make it tax deductible. If you can help, or want to know more about Backplow, contact Lood Bester on 082 925 1118 or Jani Doms on 076 313 7212 or email them at lood@terugploeg.co.za or jani@atterbury.co.za