Donkerhoek Data has reached the 40 year benchmark and with this we asked our owner, Mark Groenewald, to tell us the success story of how Donkerhoek Data came to this milestone.
Donkerhoek Data was birthed in Canada in 1976 when Robert Koch and his family spent 3 months visiting friends. He was introduced to a Commodore Computer (the one you had to plug in to your tv screen!). Fascinated by this strange machine, he brought one home, along with a thick book on how to program in Quick Basic.
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.
Christo du Toit and Mary Oosthuizen joined the team and assisted Rob in growing the business, while Rob’s son, Michael Koch and Alwyn Geldenhuys took over the running of the farm. Donkerhoek became the testing ground for many of the software programs. As the business grew, so the team grew and Rob viewed them all as family. He insisted the Donkerhoek Data team join his family for lunch every day around the big round table in the main house, and he enjoyed seeing the growth and development of each person that joined the staff.
The business had many ups and downs in the early days as it developed and later on Rob’s daughter and son-in-law, Ros & Mark Groenewald, joined the team. Together they streamlined the business into the strong stable business it is today, assisting the Agricultural Industry through many ups and downs, while providing work for many families over the last 40 years.