•••
JUANITA GREYLING
G ENE R AL
Let’s raise our glasses to
NAMPO’S 50 years of success!
D
r. Willie Kotze, former
Sampi director, made the
following prediction in 1967, after
the first Harvest Day: “I believe
that the Harvest Day will become
world famous, like the Flower Festival in Holland, the Rhine Festival
in Germany and the Windhoek
Carnival.” Today, 50 years later,
Nampo is regarded as the largest
privately owned agricultural exhibition in the world. Shows you,
where there's a will there's a way!
The Nampo Harvest Day started as a small gathering on the farm
Donkerhoek in the Bloemfontein
district in 1967. The objective
of the first Nampo Harvest Day
was to create an opportunity for
agricutural input suppliers and
producers where they could jointly
make informed production and
buying decisions. The objective is
still the same - the only difference
is that the first Nampo Harvest
Day was attended by more than
200 farmers from the Free State
and Western Transvaal and transactions of more than R50 000
were concluded. Today the Nampo
Harvest Day is attended by more
than 20 000 visitors per day.
During the Harvest Day of
1968 a lot of attention was afforded to food preparation. The ladies
were requested to ensure that there
would be sosaties on the menu and
were reminded that maize porridge
goes with boerewors and braaivleis.
Today you can choose from a wide
selection of foods, from braaivleis
to candy floss and curry and rice!
Right from the first Nampo
Harvest Day, leading figures acted
as speakers and announcers. The
former chairman of the Atomic
Energy Board, Dr AJ Roux, was
the keynote speaker and beloved Fanus Rautenbach was the
announcer. Today the Nampo
Nampo Park
P hoto by : potchefstroom herald
6
Apr/May 2016 • SENWES Scenario
Harvest Day has its own Nampo
Radio Channel and all announcements and speakers can be heard
by all visitors, the public and the
rest of South Africa. A relatively
new addition is the lively chat
program, known as Nation in
Conversation - a Senwes initiative
- where people of different affiliations and from different polit