Similar to the tomato, the original fruit masquerading as a vegetable, fresh produce enterprise ZZ2 isn’t entirely what it’s known for being – a tomato farm.
Head of IT at ZZ2 Martin Jansen describes the company as a “diversified farming group” that has simple, but innovative technology at the heart of its systems. In fact, with a bit of creativity, one can create an entire meal including both a fruit salad and a vegetable salad, as well as some meat from ZZ2 farms.
“We started off with tomatoes as our primary crop. We did all sorts of other crops over the years, but what we’ve got now in our basket of products is tomatoes, obviously, which make up the largest portion of our business, avocados, the second largest, and then apples, pears and onions in the Western Cape,and Medjool dates in Namibia. We have cherries in the northern part of the country, and also Cape Almond Farming, he explains.
In addition, ZZ2 is also a cattle farm. “We’ve got quite a history with, and a love of, cattle that forms part of the culture of the company. So, we actually have a breed, PinZ²yl, which is a special breed: it’s a cross between a Pinzgauer and an Nguni,” he adds.
As a child, Martin remembers how he often visited the subtropical province of Limpopo when visiting two other generations of his family who also worked at ZZ2. “My grandparents worked at ZZ2, and my mother’s side of the family all worked here. So, I’m a third-generation employee - it just worked out like that it wasn't planned,” he says.
Growing up in a period he calls “the start of the internet craze in South Africa”, when technology was becoming more accessible to families, sparked his love for IT.
“I loved computers. My first computer was seriously old – some old 8086 variant office computer that my dad got from someone. It had an early version of DOS – very basic.”
From actuarial science to computer science
He remembers his father, a conveyancing attorney, used computers to maximise his productivity, something he now experiences in his farming-technology role at ZZ2. “The evolution in his time went from a conveyancing secretary who could draft a transfer document in a week and a half using a normal old typewriter. When it became a digital typewriter then it came down to four days.
“Using a word processor it then became two days. By the time he had made a database and used the merge and print functionality, it had come down to 30 seconds if you planned everything right. Amazing inspiration,” he says.
This led him to dabble in computer science at school after finding a book on programming in the library. “I went to the Science and Engineering Festival at Wits University, a programme for the Top 10 students at some of the school’s in Johannesburg. And I got exposed to a whole bunch of study directions.
“The thing that actually got me was actuarial science. So I thought that was what I wanted to do,” he said. He applied for, and was accepted to, Actuarial Science at RAU, now the University of Johannesburg, but soon realised it was not what he wanted to pursue. So he switched his degree to a BSc in IT and then furthered his studies part-time for an honours in computer science.
“I always enjoyed the programming side of it a lot. I understood the networking and hardware infrastructure side as well, but the programming aspect was very fascinating and powerful. It was so liberating to be able to create something out of nothing, purely almost with your mind and some typing,” he says.
Future-proof diversions
While pursuing his honours part-time, he joined SRK Consulting, an engineering consulting firm where he was hired for a part-time tech support job over the December holidays. “I got to know some of the scientists there and they offered me a full-time job as a database programmer in the strategic information management services (SIMS) ) department, it’s like the geographic information system (GIS) spatial department with databases and applications.”
The road to ZZ2 included working for Just Enough, inventory optimisation specialists, E-Logics, custom development, and infrastructure and maintenance management software specialists, as well as Shoprite, where he was employed in the special projects department under Pieter Engelbrecht. There, he ended up working operationally on inventory optimisation in the stores and supply chain along with various other projects.
“So, even though I’ve got a very strong technology foundation, I spent a lot of time working on business process optimisation at the confluence of where IT and business meet,” Martin explains.
This diversion, he says, prepared him for his future career at ZZ2, which required innovative approaches and problem-solving skills. “I really found my passion, which is multidisciplinary – a wide variety of contexts that you have to manage and to switch to.”
When asked if he would have chosen any other career in hindsight, Martin said perhaps industrial engineering.
“I didn’t know about industrial engineering when I had to make my career choice, ironically spending much of his time working on similar challenges to this discipline of engineering. It just wasn’t on my radar. I like strategic thinking. I like thinking about problems. I like solving them,” he adds.
Farming ninjas
He may not have the CIO title at ZZ2, but his responsibilities do. “My role at ZZ2 is the de facto CIO. I’m also the managing director of a company called ThinkNinjas, which is a specialist software development company.
“It’s actually a company that I started in the Cape that’s become part of our group. And so, my responsibility is to slot that in as part of the CIO role,” Martin explains.
Unique challenges
The nature of ZZ2’s business demands an alternative approach to IT. “At ZZ2 and most other farming groups, they tend to have farms, farm offices and corporate offices at different places. They have packhouses with large infrastructure. So, it’s lot of different sites spread across a wide area.”
He notes how the geography and remote nature of farm settings, including Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, North West Province, Mpumalanga and Namibia for ZZ2, make it difficult to access services that are more accessible in cities.
“But here, it’s not like that. So, you’ve really have to will into existence a lot of IT infrastructure and maintain it, keep it working, and form close partnerships with service providers. We work very closely with Vodacom as well as regional partners such as Letaba Wireless,” he notes.
Fit for form
Though his team has procured some of the technology used at the farms, it’s had to also build some of it, as well as design systems that are fit for the environment.
Though he believes in ensuring that tech spend “fits the function as closely as possible”, he also believes that some of the best solutions require less technology – noting how a simple spreadsheet can sometimes be more effective at solving problems than a high-tech app off the shelf.
“If it can’t fit the function, we might end up building a solution for it. Many systems are overly complex, they’re too complicated where they should be simple, and too simple where they should be complicated. A lot of people in Europe and America don’t understand the challenges that we face in South Africa or Africa in general,” Martin points out.
In addition to high-end technology, he said powerful and simple platforms like Google WorkSpace have enabled ZZ2’s teams to work efficiently in a decentralised environment. ZZ2 teams are spread across its multiple farms and some are remote and hybrid workers who work from home.
Responsible farming through technology and challenges
Technology, he said, has enabled ZZ2 to simplify and streamline processes, save resources and improve efficiency, while conserving the land on which they operate.
Martin says his team uses a range of technologies for multiple functions ranging from managing the tech in different departments including marketing, HR and sales, to managing the plants on the farm as well as the telemetry data from the different parts of the ZZ2 enterprise.
“The way I see it is that technology can improve the business in three fundamental ways. The one is you can choose the right technology that is maybe cheaper than another technology and more effective. The second way is you can reduce expenses by using the correct amount of stuff. So making the right decision can cause you to spend less money. Then the third and most important way, is you can somehow increase production, increase the income of a business. IT has very few places, I think, that it can do this - but where it actually increases the revenue or has a hand in helping to increase the revenue in a more direct way is worth pursuing,” he says.
Using the Nature Farming system, the ZZ2 uses a “middle-of-the-road” approach that combines organic and inorganic farming methods – enabling the enterprise to explore the technology benefits while running a large-scale enterprise in harmony with nature.
“You’re in the middle. You use as much of the best of both worlds as possible. And I love that balanced approach to things,” he adds.
Phytech is a fantastic technology that enables the farm to monitor plant health and to match the water demand of the plant with supply more closely – another technology procured and maintained by his team. In addition to this, their own custom-developed Agriotec system allows them to automate and control irrigation to a very fine level of detail. These technologies combine to save energy and provide flexibility needed to optimise to a high degree.
“It allows you to go into the precision agricultural space, more so than you would normally if you didn’t have a digital system. It allows you to capture the data faster and more accurately,” explains Martin.
Prior to using the bespoke mobile waypoint scouting app, scouts physically had to go and look at the plants with little information on where to focus and how to systematically capture data. They would then have to manually capture their findings on paper, have it transferred to a spreadsheet that would then go through multiple processes before interventions could be planned and implemented.
The process, Martin said, took two to three days – delaying timely interventions and causing a ripple effect throughout the business. Now the information is instantly available digitally for a decision and an intervention can be planned and implemented within as little as 12 hours, reducing potential waste and maximising efficiency and efficacy.
An affinity for the classics
To unwind, he takes walks as a form of exercise, and spends time with family. “I really like spending time with my family when I’m not working. But I also really like working. So my wife often has to force me to go camping or something,” said Martin candidly.
One of Martin’s hobbies includes reading about cars and watching YouTube videos on car repairs and reviews, which inspired him to buy a modern-day classic – a project he enjoys working on with his son during his downtime. “I love cars. I love how cars work and engines. I know a lot about the theory of it, but in practice I’m not so good at it, so I need a mechanic to do the big jobs.
“And I recently bought an old Land Cruiser that my son and I ended up washing, cleaning, and doing some basic maintenance on. So that’s the kind of stuff I can see myself getting more into over time – being able to do small repair jobs with my son,” he concludes.
