(Archive) A conversation with Prof. Venter, a founding member of SAIAE - S2E3

During the SAIAE symposium in 2024, Dr. Maharaj sat down with Professor Gert Venter for a remarkable interview. As one of South Africa's most experienced Agricultural Engineers and a founding member of SAIAE, Prof. Venter reflects on an extraordinary career spanning decades. Now at the age of 90, he shares insights from his professional journey, which includes everything from early soil conservation efforts and academic leadership at the University of Pretoria to overhauling tractor mechanisation and creating 9-gigawatt industrial burners. He also offers valuable perspectives on the origins and formation of the South African Institute of Agricultural Engineers.

While the audio quality is limited, we’re excited to share the valuable insights in this episode and believe our audience will greatly value Prof. Venter’s perspectives.

He is available on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-gerhardus-venter-89b71a35/ 

Transcript

Introductory Announcer: Hello, and welcome to the Agricultural Engineering podcast. This podcast covers all aspects of agricultural engineering. It is produced by the South African Institute of Agricultural Engineers. The series of episodes that will be brought to you has been funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering. We encourage you to tune in and explore the exciting world of agricultural engineering with us. My name is Yudhav Maharaj, and I'm your host for today's episode. We're excited to share this special episode with you, featuring an incredible guest who's a leading expert in agricultural engineering. However, we do want to apologize in advance for the audio quality, which is not up to our usual standards. Despite the technical challenges, we believed it was essential to share this conversation with you, as our guest's insights and wisdom are truly valuable and worth hearing. So please bear with us and let's dive into this important conversation.

Yudhav Maharaj (Host): Hello Professor Fenter and welcome to the South African Institute of Agricultural Engineering podcast. It's honestly a pleasure to be speaking to you today, and I know that SAIIE is an organization that you helped to found, but before we get into that, could you please provide a little bit of background about who you are, and then afterwards we can get on with the podcast.

Prof. Fenter: Okay, basically talking about myself, I grew up as a kid on a farm, very poor conditions after the Anglo-Boer War or, you know, like that. And standard farm child and really we were struggling financially. But I was able to go through university, I was good at school, and was able to do that, a bachelor's degree in agricultural engineering, doing it on my own the first year, traveling by train to the university and back, and losing out on the first period for the subjects and so on. So it was difficult times.

Further on, I started as an engineer in the Department of Agriculture doing soil conservation work, and then after two years, there was a vacancy at the University of Pretoria. I became a lecturer in agricultural engineering, enrolled for my master's degree which I completed cum laude, and immediately got promoted to a senior lectureship, and then from there onwards I immediately started with my doctorate degree which I did there. And then I became an engineer—well, an assistant director, sorry, in the Department of Agricultural Engineering in Silverton in Pretoria at the ARC previously.

Yeah, this is more or less where it started.

Yudhav Maharaj: Prof, can you tell us a little about how the Agricultural Engineering Institute, or SAIIE as we call it, has evolved over the years to become the institute that we now know and love in South Africa?

Prof. Fenter: Yeah, during that period, while I was at the university and earlier portion at the Division of Agricultural Engineering, that was when agricultural engineering—we as agricultural engineers—were mostly involved, previously, with soil conservation. And some of them were working other jobs, you know, some of them were school teachers, some of the agricultural engineers were working for municipalities and so on. So they had odd jobs, but nobody was really involved in a sort of an organization where we could all sort of speak to each other and work through one tube.

So at that stage, we as agricultural engineers at the universities decided, listen, it is time for us to really get an organization to represent agricultural engineers. So I was part of the initial meetings that we had to decide to go forth and get accreditation. That was before ECSA, we still had ECSA in the English Engineering Institute and so on. And I can't even remember all those names, but we then had some meetings and then we started to really fight for the institute to be fully formed. And initially, once we were formed, we started to battle to become recognized by the other institutions as well. The general idea was that we were not really engineers; we were like in Europe, they call everybody an engineer when he is an agronomist or whatever, sort of a specialist in his field.

Yudhav Maharaj: That is fascinating insights, Prof, but can you also tell us about some of the steps that were taken to get SAIIE recognized as an engineering body, and also recognized by ECSA?

Prof. Fenter: We had to really convince them that look at the subjects that we are taking and, you know, it is really mathematics and applied mathematics, those types of things, and engineering principles that we are working on, not on other technologies. So eventually we were able to get recognized, and that was during the stage when ECSA was formed as well. I was our representative at ECSA for a couple of years. During the initial stages of SAIIE, we were only about 50 members. My number at ECSA was number 49. Because you know my surname is Fenter, so I'm almost at the bottom of the alphabet.

So yeah, we had about 55 members because I was actually the honorary secretary of SAIIE for the first two or three years. I did everything for them as far as the finances and administration was concerned, free of charge, just as being part of the story. And from there, it is amazing to see where agricultural engineering, where the institute is standing today with international recognition. Well, we from the start were involved with the American Society as well, ASAE, and some of the organizations in Europe, but this was just on a sort of a loose basis, you know, we were in contact and we attended some of them—well, individually attended some of their functions and symposia and so on over the years.

Okay, from my side, um, if you need any more information, I can give you more information about my personal background and what I've done as an agricultural engineer.

Yudhav Maharaj: Yeah, I think definitely to create some perspective. You know SAIIE is obviously celebrating their 60th anniversary, and you were there at the inception of SAIIE. So just for the audience to get some perspective and maybe a time scale, if you don't mind sharing your age with the audience, that will be really good. And I think from my side I can say with certainty that you're the most experienced agricultural engineer that I've ever met or spoken to. So before we get into the work that you've done for the industry, it'll be good to get your perspective, and also give some perspective to the audience so that they can understand the wisdom that you come with.

Prof. Fenter: Okay, within the next four or five months, I will be 90 years old. That's what they call a nonagenarian. At the moment, I'm still an octogenarian, somebody in the 80s. So yes, I'm out. Luckily my brain is still ticking over quite nicely, so I have not any problems remembering things and dates and so on. Some years, you know, may fade away due to not using it and so on.

Thinking back about those earlier days, if you look at the photos which I've just been looking at during the symposium that I attended with you this week, um, looking at the photos, all the guys on those photos are not with us anymore. And I'm the only surviving individual who was really involved with the initial stages of SAIIE, the organizing of meetings before and right from the start. I was a member of the board for a couple of years while I was in the Department of Agriculture, but when I moved out into private, into the private sector, um, I had to resign as secretary because I wouldn't have the time to keep on with that.

So this gives you a bit of a background. What I did as an agricultural engineer, I started in soil conservation. I was still, that was before my marriage, with my wife of course, and so I was the only young engineer who wasn't married. So at that stage, James Matthee was actually the senior engineer, the engineer in charge of us was Mr. Pazzi, P-A-Z-Z-I, Mr. Pazzi, a German engineer who actually qualified as an agricultural engineer in Germany as far as I can remember. Many of these names today, people don't know about them.

Before that, the head of the Department of Agricultural Engineering was Professor van Tonder, and ag engineering was actually initially started under the Department of Surveyors, Land Surveyors. They actually, it was asked by the Department of Agriculture to start an agricultural engineering division, and the main driving force at that stage was for soil conservation.

Okay, so I started in soil conservation, then I took a post as lecturer and senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria. During that period, I don't know how I did it, but I was able to give classes, prepare myself properly for the classes, knowing what I'm talking about, at the same time enrolling for a whole series of postgraduate courses in other engineering departments like metallurgy, civil engineering, I had very heavy mathematical courses that I took there, and even electronics and electrical engineering as well in the other engineering divisions. That was when just when the engineering division was started at the University of Pretoria. My first degree was in the Department of Agriculture, Faculty of Agriculture.

Okay, um, if I look back at my experiences from there, I then became the assistant director in the Division of Agricultural Engineering at the Department of Agricultural Technical Services in Silverton in Pretoria with Yaapie Bruwer. Um, I stayed there from 1966 to 1970, when I decided my chances for promotion is a little bit difficult due to my age. I'm just two, three years younger than Yaapie, and I'll have to wait until he retires before I can get a promotion, so I moved out.

I then took up a job as a director of the research division of Vetsak in Bothaville. I really enjoyed designing new implements and so on because I did a master's degree on vibration and vibratory implements and so on, a lot of heavy mathematics and things involved there.

Yudhav Maharaj: I can imagine it must have been really difficult. So for all the maths and science enthusiasts, can you please talk us through some of the design work that you have done?

Prof. Fenter: I was very well trained in mechanization at that stage, so I was able to design plows and all kinds of implements within a couple of days. But I was also looking forward, more forward than what the sales people were doing, so we always were sort of not arguing, but we had different views of which directions to take. They asked me to design new sets of implements for tractors of 40, 45 horsepower at that stage, which all the farmers had those types of tractors. I mean, most of the farmers in Bothaville and those areas, the plowing areas, Lichtenburg and so on, the big farmers had 60, 70 tractors on a farm, 60, 70 drivers. And they were all working with trailed combines, the Slattery combine and Vetsak had the LM combine, that can take one row of mealies at a time.

So, as far as mechanization, this is the worst scenario that you could ever think about. Vetsak actually propagated a system that allowed them to sell more tractors by looking at what they called the Mini-Maxi, which was a ripper combined with a single planter, a planter behind it. Now, if you do that from an engineering point of view, planting you can run at 12, 14 kilometers per hour, planters are able to do that. Ripping is a heavy draft operation which you do at two or three kilometers per hour, and plowing is somewhere in between. But now what happens is that during planting time, you need many tractors to be able to pull a planter at the speed of a ripper, and that is what really killed the whole story.

Okay, so I became a little bit frustrated looking at small implements. I wanted to build larger implements, so I went to John Deere. They contacted me actually because they wanted to have a dealership started in Bothaville where the competition was very stiff, because all the other tractor companies were there and Vetsak manufactured there, and I was competing, would have been competing against Fiat, Ford, Massey Ferguson, the whole lot.

Yudhav Maharaj: Okay, thanks for that Prof, but I just wanted to clarify something with respect to history. So prior to your involvement with John Deere, was there no John Deere in South Africa?

Prof. Fenter: No, John Deere was very well represented in South Africa, but they were not in Bothaville. There were a couple of farmers there, they had John Deere tractors, but they had to go to Klerksdorp or Rustenburg for services and those types of things. And they already at that stage had three dealerships in Bothaville that couldn't cope with the competition, they just went down the drain.

But then John Deere told me that they want me to start, they knew me at that stage as a good designer and someone knowledgeable in the mechanization field. I said well, they want me to start with it, I said listen, as a guy who's drawing a salary, there's no way that I can buy tractors and put them on the floor and start selling them. They said no, they've got a consignment system which is quite easy, they put the tractors on my floor, I don't worry about it, but if I sell it, I have to pay for it. So I didn't have to put up my own capital to start with.

Make a long story short, four years after starting up from scratch without any capital, with a 10,000 rand overdraft, I was the second largest private John Deere dealer in South Africa. The largest one was the guys in Rustenburg, the Ferreira brothers.

I was able to switch over from this mechanization story with small tractors to coming in with big tractors. The first big deal that I did was with a guy by the name of Piet Steyn, a young guy. He came to me and he said he cannot really, he's working on 2000 hectares and he's not making a profit, and if I can help him because he thinks his mechanization cost is killing him. So I looked at his mechanization, that guy had 73 tractors and he had 26 combines on his farm doing 2000 hectares.

And I looked at the whole thing and I started to do mechanization planning because with my research as in my doctorate degree, I knew exactly what energy is going into the soil to till the soil. And I realized but gee whiz, this guy's got so many implements and the whole system is wrong, what he should be doing is prepare the soil in advance and during planting time he's just going in with the planters, he can do it with much less kilowatts.

So I switched 72 tractors of 45 kilowatt roughly, we got rid of them, and replaced them with three big John Deeres. In total, about 600 kilowatt. And they were able to do the job, but we started to rip directly after the combines and we just had a very well mechanization planning system running.

Yudhav Maharaj: So Prof, did you fund all of these projects in your personal capacity, and yeah, it's quite interesting how the interest rates affected your endeavors in the past.

Prof. Fenter: Yeah, initially I used my own funds to build houses, and I had three luxury homes in Waterkloof Ridge in Pretoria that I built, but with the interest rates going up like that, there were no buyers. So I couldn't get rid of them, the one I exchanged and so on, but your cash flow becomes a problem, so I had to borrow from the banks, and then with those interest rates, things really, really went bad for me. So I had to really do something else.

So then I took up industrial burners with my brother and we started designing that, we installed a big burner at Sappe Ngodwana, near Nelspruit. Very fancy burner that I don't want to give too much detail, but it was a burner that was giving out, at full capacity it was doing 9 gigawatt energy that it was pumping into that rotary kiln. Burning pulverized coal at the rate of 26 train truck loads per day. So that was a very nice system to be in, and we were actually working with the mining industry with calcining and so on as well.

But then my brother and myself, we had a little bit of a difference of opinions, so I bowed out there, and then I became head of the Department of Agricultural Engineering in Pretoria, when a professorship became available. So I was for eight years, I was chair of the Department of Ag Engineering. I retired at the age of 60, and then I didn't have much to do, so I really started to play around with things like hydroponics and greenhouses as a hobby.

And then all of a sudden I realized, listen, this is, this is quite an interesting field for an agricultural engineer, because you actually work with all facets of engineering as far as that's concerned. You've got the structural side of it, where you need to design a structure that could withstand wind speeds and all that type of things, and it can carry a load of plants hanging from the structure. So you've got the structural design of it, on top of that, you've got irrigation, where you've got the hydraulics side of ag engineering being applied. You've got climate control, you just look at plants' requirements for plant growth, I take look at my five fingers and I can tell you it's water, air, light, climate, and nutrients.

Yudhav Maharaj: I really like how you've summarized climate control so simply and eloquently. Can you elaborate on how energy is so important to food production when thinking about greenhouse design?

Prof. Fenter: So all facets of ag engineering is involved there, climate control, heating, cooling, irrigation, hydraulics, structural design, everything, even some of the mechanization as well if you look at materials handling and all those types of things.

This developed into a system where I trained agricultural technologists that are interested in hydroponics and greenhouses, I started training courses, and I was running training courses on a monthly basis right through South Africa from 1989 to about 1995, when some other people came in and the competition became stiff and I backed out of that. I also started to design greenhouses, I did a lot, probably 30, the best part of 30 business planning for people doing this, so I was really a specialist in that field, I still am.

Right at this stage, I am still doing consulting work even though my eyesight is not what it should be anymore, I've got difficulty reading and so on, but with modern technology I get by, it's just much slower than it was in the past.

Yudhav Maharaj: Yeah, you know Prof, you've really inspired me, and it's inspirational just hearing you speak, and my key takeaways from this are that you are definitely a hard worker, just based on your background on the farm, to having to take a train to campus, and then getting your degree with cum laude pass despite all those challenges. You definitely are someone that aims very high, and you're not scared of diversifying and not scared of change. And yeah, you didn't stick to one particular field. And I think on that note, maybe one last thing that we can ask from you is if you could provide some advice to young engineers or young agricultural engineers on how we could get some longevity in the field, and be a bit like you, if we can.

Prof. Fenter: Well if I look back over my life and the successes that I've had, it's a normal road that anybody will have, you've got your successes but you've got your knocks as well, which I told you about, you know, when I went into building those houses and so on. But I think the big thing is you need to have a driving force, something within you must tell you to go forward, it doesn't matter what the conditions are, how difficult they are.

If you've got that driving force in you, it can take you very fast, very far. The other thing is not to shy away from a project if you think this is not really in line with agricultural engineering. Ag engineering puts you in a position where, I went into industrial burners, I mean the building industry, you know, so, and in the meantime, my agricultural engineering background was actually pushing me through that with ease.

So the big thing is, you should see your training as a broad-based training, and okay, you can say you're a jack of all trades and the others they always said master of none. That's nonsense. An agricultural engineer is a jack of all trades, but he's master of a hell of a lot of disciplines that he can apply, and if you just realize that, use that knowledge, if you've got any chances of improving and working in a wider field, go for it, you've got the potential to do it.

And the big thing is, never stop learning. I can give you an idea. I'm at the moment in an, not an old age home, but a sort of a retirement village. And many of the people there are much younger than, younger than I am, 10, 15, 20 years younger than I am. And I cannot have a conversation with them at a level where they can talk with me when it comes to computers and new technology and so on, they haven't got a clue.

I am using computers, I'm lucky I was using computers in 1966 already, when you still had to sort of have a special typewriter to type holes into a little card, and you've got the card readers and so on, you couldn't communicate, there wasn't even a monitor on a computer. But I stayed, with all the new developments, I'm spot on even today with artificial intelligence, two days after it became available on the internet, I was working with it. And it's a lot of nonsense sometimes being bandied around about the dangers of artificial intelligence and everything, a motor vehicle is a dangerous vehicle if you use it wrongly.

Yudhav Maharaj: Yes, you are correct about that Prof, and your wisdom does come through in that answer. You know we all have to be aware of what is out there, how to use it, and also acknowledge the limitations but not be scared or panicked about the benefits of these different and new technologies, even if it may be new to us.

Prof. Fenter: Exactly, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. And the potential for this is so vast that you, but we have to keep in touch with industry developments, economic developments, and political developments. They all can change your life in a tremendous way. But as an agricultural engineer, you never look back, you just go forward.

Yudhav Maharaj: That's truly profound Prof, and again I agree with you, and I'm sure everyone listening to this is going to gain a lot of inspiration from you and the advice that you gave. You know, I'm sure you're not going to stop publishing books, papers, and research outputs. And I know, I have a little bit of inside information, so I know that you're going to be writing a book about your life, and I'm definitely keen to read that and, yeah, looking forward to learning more or reading more about your life, and yeah, I just like to thank you for joining us today Prof, it has really been an honor speaking to you.

Prof. Fenter: I can just mention that people ask me how is it possible that you cannot read anymore, because this macular degeneration of my eyes doesn't allow me to, I cannot focus here. But I've got the peripheral vision, I can quite easily see on the outside edges of my eye, so I don't have, I'm not blind, I can walk around. But I cannot on my computer, quite honestly I cannot, I have got a big screen, and I cannot properly read it properly except with a magnifying glass because the letters are all blurred.

So what I've done is just get the computer to talk to me and tell me what emails are coming through, and they reading read the email to me, and then I respond by dictating into the computer, and the computer then puts it on the screen, and I say okay read what's on the screen because I cannot read it myself. It reads it back to me, and I see okay that makes sense, and then I send it out. And at the moment with a book I'm doing exactly the same, dictating it.

Yudhav Maharaj: It's really cool Prof that you embrace new technology and you actually are using it. But are there any other interesting tools that you are using to help you write this book of yours?

Prof. Fenter: Right at the start I said artificial intelligence, I want to write a book on my life, I've got quite a lot, this is what I want in it. Give me a breakdown. Eight seconds later, they give me a printout with a forward that I could almost use just as it is, a breakdown of 10 chapters that makes sense, and every chapter they tell me what I should put in that chapter. Now it's so easy, I just think about a certain stage of my life and I start dictating right out chapter number seven. It's a piece of cake.

And then of course I also know some software programs on the internet which I'm using, so I just take what I dictate, which may be long sentences, difficult to understand, I put it through a software program, Hemingway Editor, and he tells me in red lines that thing is difficult to read, change it, make the sentences shorter, make the paragraph shorter. And I can see, for somebody to read it, he needs to have a tertiary training of four years, and it'll come down to standard six after I've made changes.

Yudhav Maharaj: It's truly impressive that you can use technology at the age of 89 and a half, even today, and you have embraced technology so nicely. So yeah, it's just again a testament to the type of person that you are, you definitely don't let anything stand in your way. Thank you so much, and I'm sure it must be really good for you to see what you've built at SAIIE after 60 years. So yeah, thanks again Prof and all the best with writing your book.

Prof. Fenter: It's a pleasure, and all the best for the Institute of Agricultural Engineering. I was so glad that I could attend this meeting or the symposium, it was really the cherry on the cake.

Yudhav Maharaj (Outro): As we wrap up that episode with Prof Fenter, I have to admit it was a surreal experience for me meeting someone with that much wisdom, and I'm sure you all have enjoyed the podcast. But please keep an eye out for our next episode, and don't forget to like, subscribe and share the podcast with your friends. You can find the SAIIE podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.