Once back on his fruit farm, Donkerhoek, in South Africa, he continued to farm whilst learning to program at night.  He began to write programs to simplify tedious administrative tasks on the farm. Robert was the 3rd generation of the Koch family farming with fruit, livestock and tunnel farming over the years, while building his own irrigation systems, road scrapers, pack houses, dams and much more. Along with being on the board of directors of the Stellenpak Fruit Packhouse, Deciduous Fruit Board and Drakenstein Cooperative Winery, all led to his clever designs for software development in Agriculture.

The software he developed helped to simplify his administration with regards to payroll, bookkeeping, costing, piecework & spray programs. Boland Kelder, a cooperative winery, then approached Robert to create a program for them that could manage the delivery of grapes from the various farmers.  He wrote what he called the “Kaarte” program and this jumpstarted Donkerhoek Data into a business. Various farmers then put their requests in for programs to manage different farming activities, such as the Egg Farming program for Francois Brown from Elkana, amongst others. With each sale he made, clients would ask him to source them a computer as not many people in those days had their own pc, let alone knew what to do with it! So hence the Hardware division was added to the business. Robert soon realized he needed the help of a team around him, so that he could focus more on the software design and development.