Home - Mayfield Family Farm

Ocean waves at daytime. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

Living with the land.
Connecting with each other.
Thriving through diversity

Our Land

Mayfield Farm has a rich history; Piers being the third generation of his family to have the honour of farming here. It all began with his grandfather, who used to farm sugarcane in Cuba but during the turbulent Cuban revolutions and independence in the 1930’s, foreigners were chased out. Mr Garnett snr. went back to England but then chose South Africa as his new home and started working for Doringkop Sugar. In 1942, during his employment here, he bought Mayfield Farm, spending his evenings and weekends building it up and destumping (on horseback) large wattle plantations. There was a small cottage, which had served as the Thring’s British Outpost in the 1880’s but a new farmhouse was built in 1946 and the family moved in (This is the home that Piers and his family currently live in). Piers’ Dad, Christopher, was 8 years old at the time. Fast forward to when Piers had completed his studies at the Agricultural College in Nelspruit, done some traveling and at the age of 27, Christopher asked him to come back to Mayfield to manage the farm. This has always surprised Piers as he was always the latest riser, out of him and his 3 siblings and never pictured himself as a farmer! However, things always turn out the way they are meant to and here we all are!

Piers is passionate about preserving this precious heritage and takes the role as custodian of this piece of land to heart.

ReWild

The Re-wild products are made on Mayfield Family Farm, by hand and in small batches. Dominique made the first product in 1998 and it was the moisturiser. The formulation remains the same and is one of the fastest moving products of the Re-wild range. As the family’s needs grew, so did the product range in an attempt to ensure that the products being used were toxin free and back in the 90’s not much was available on the market. The next product was the Sunshield which was developed for the children when they were young and has been tried and tested in the hot Kwazulu Natal coastline. The focus of the family has always been healthy living, clean eating and this ethos naturally extended to products being used on the skin. The products have developed a bit of a cult-following as the enjoyment and benefits of the products spread by word of mouth.

Organic Status

Mayfield’s Macadamia orchards and Tea Tree fields are all Organically certified. This means that annually we have to go through a rigorous auditing process to ensure that the farm and the crops are compliant as well as the farming practices. The auditing process looks not only at the administrative side but also at the physical land, staff, implements used, inputs and farming practices. No stone is left unturned! The audit follows concepts such as traceability and accountability. All inputs are scrutinized and every i has to be dotted and every t crossed! Not only does the farm and the crops need to be certified, but the processing buildings do too. This means that the Still that processes the Tea Tree must go through the same process to be Organically certified, as does the processing plant that handles the macadamia crop either for nuts or oil.

Macadamia Nuts

Mayfield Farm now has a few Macadamia orchards which are organic. This means that there is no use of any chemical sprays on the trees and only organic inputs are allowed. Some of the inputs are compost which is produced on the farm, in partnership with Convert the Dirt. Worm Tea and various organic teas, fertilisers and nutrients are used as needed.

Tea Tree

The idea of Tea Tree had settled in Piers’ mind about ten years prior to the project actually becoming a reality. The idea of Stilling essential oils had always been an appealing idea. Piers had experimented with one or two small Stills at Mayfield and slowly the idea grew. As synchronicity would have it, and some fortuitous meetings of some interesting people who helped concretise the idea. In 2017 the Still was built a few kilometers down the road from Mayfield, in a location that was central for the 10 growers who formed this project. It took a few months for Piers to get a handle on Betty the Boiler (the family name we gave the Still and boiler unit) before things were running smoothly.

More about us, the people

We are a family of five, 2 parents (Piers and Dominique) and 3 offspring (Gabriel, Noa-Grace and Sebastian). Not to forget to mention the 7 dogs (we have 5 cattle dogs which can make the house seem a little crazy at times) and of course the proverbial 2 cats. We live in a rambling farm house that has had bits and pieces added on over the decades and gives one the feeling of the hacienda in the book House of the Spirits by Isabela Alende. It is warm and welcoming, colourful and always something homemade and home-baked on the kitchen counter or in the oven. Despite being in a rural area, there is a constant flow of people in and out of the house. This flow may be in the form of friends of the family members, or out of town visitors, or professors coming to look at the famous Mayfield soil, neighbours, new connections….there really is never a dull moment!