The Fencing Act, and the Karoo is enclosed

1883 · regional

The Cape passes the Fencing Act and wire enclosure spreads: stock kept in, predators kept out, grazing controlled, and the shepherd who had walked behind the flock no longer needed. Together with drilling machines and wind pumps it is what converts thin Karoo veld into year-round carrying capacity - and all of it costs money, which is why the decades after it are decades of accumulation for farmers who already had some. F.S. Oosthuizen (PER-000006) is 27. See STO-0020.

Sources

• Karoo pastoral economy 1880s-1930s: enclosure, wool prices and the Great Depression Grundlingh & others, "The effects of the Great Depression (1929-1934) on South African White agriculture", South African Journal of Economic History 5(2), 1990; Wikipedia, "Great Depression in South Africa"; allAfrica / Karoo Space on William Beinart and the nineteenth-century Karoo wool economy; Cape Fencing Act of 1883 and Karoo enclosure

Told in

• mentioned Eighty-one thousand morgen