Exclusive interview with Dr Graham McCulloch, co-founder and director of Okavango Craft Brewery in Maun, Botswana, a unique venture that turns millet from “elephant aware” farmers and mineral water from the Okavango Delta into quality craft beer.
Please give us some background about yourself and how okavango craft brewery started?
Hi there, my name is Dr Graham McCulloch. I’m originally from Ireland, but I’ve been living and working in Botswana for the last 30 years. Professionally, I’m an ecologist by training, and I did my PhD research here in Botswana. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of work in environmental and conservation consultancy and management in the protected area management disciplines.
Recently, I became a founder and director of an innovative new business based here in Maun on the edge of the Okavango Delta, called the Okavango Craft Brewery. And really, that wasn’t by chance. It’s connected to the conservation work that we carry out and conduct through an NGO that my partner and I have been working on and been running since the last 10 years. This organisation focuses on addressing human-wildlife conflict in and around the Okavango Delta, specifically looking at ways to alleviate conflict and promote coexistence between people and elephants around the edges of the Okavango Delta.
The brewery came about as a way to create market incentives for people to change practices and behaviour towards better coexistence and to make it easier for them to coexist. There needed to be some incentives and that can come by a number of different routes, but we wanted to really connect farmers who are subsistence farmers who are living with the largest elephant population in the world and who rely on growing crops to feed their families. We wanted to connect those farmers with a market that pays them a good price for their surplus produce because they are making an effort to coexist with elephants. So really, the Okavango Craft Brewery was a brainchild out of that concept.
And fast forward 5 years, it took us a number of years to get our team together. We are a team of like-minded people, the entrepreneur and visionary, Loki Osborne, our main shareholder, Heine Du Toit, a food tech scientist who came up with the idea of craft beer to add value to millet, Francine Sheldon, who is a Botswana citizen and also experienced in livelihood improvements in rural areas around Botswana, Anna Songhurst, founder director of Ecoexist and myself. And so, we generated enough investment to start the business. Literally, we began in 2019 just before COVID, so we are a COVID business, one might say. But, we are now in our third year of production and business, and it’s been a great success and we are now at a stage where we are scaling the business to basically benefit more farmers.
Tell us more about the environmentally friendly processes that you use, also incorporating the local community.
The Okavango Craft Brewery was born out of the idea that it links small-scale subsistence farmers who are making a lot of effort to coexist with elephants in growing crops for food security and to sustain their families. But also, they have an opportunity with organic produce that they grow. Most of it comprises millet and sorghum, the grain that they use to feed themselves. That is a produce that they grow that has potential to enter a market into a food and beverage manufacturing industry, which is really only just growing here in Botswana.
We saw an opportunity with the farmers that we work with to help them coexist with elephants and to turn surplus produce that they harvest into a value added product that rewards them through premium prices for that surplus produce, to incentivise them to continue their pro-coexistence practices and behaviour. So, really the environmental, the green economy aspect of the brewery really starts at the beginning of the supply chain, with the farmers, training and supporting the farmers to conduct conservation agriculture, really looking after the soil, protecting areas that are not too big and unmanageable, but intensifying agriculture on those plots. Looking after the soil basically means cover crops, crop rotation with legumes, but it ultimately means higher yields per hectare. That then translates into better food security, higher yields and a surplus at the end of the day.
We also assist the farmers to properly protect their fields from elephants, as they live with tens of thousands of elephants in the same landscape. So, using different mitigation measures to protect the fields, passive methods to reduce the need for negative confrontations that sometimes result in injury and or death, in both cases for elephants and for people.
The third one is really the farmers understanding and recognising the need for corridors to allow elephants to move between critical resource use areas, using these critical movement pathways that form corridors in between villages and field areas. And their acceptance that in order to reduce conflict, allowing elephants to move along these corridors without blocking their pathway, goes a long way towards the long-term solutions and addressing the underlying drivers of the conflict.
So, doing all of these things, farmers really engage and participate and actually sign conservation agreements to say that they will practice conservation agriculture, they’ll protect their fields, and they’ll respect corridors. And as a result, the brewery pays twice the normal market price for their millet and the brewery turns that millet into malt and then into craft beer. And that craft beer is then sold back into the tourism industry to the many visitors that come here to see the same elephants in our pristine Garden of Eden, which is the Okavango Delta.
What are the main challenges that you have faced and some of the lessons you have learned so far?
It sounds like a great concept and we very quickly realised that if we wanted to connect farmers to a market, but there is no such thing here in northwestern Botswana, a food and beverage manufacturing industry, there’s virtually nothing in that sector here. So, we realised that we needed to actually start something ourselves. And that’s why we got the group together to create the Okavango Craft Brewery. And we wanted to keep the supply chain short. We wanted the products to be sourced locally and for the craft beer to be manufactured here in the Okavango Delta area. So, one of the challenges then was to equip and set up a brewery in Maun, which is the first of its kind in this part of the country in Northern Botswana.
But even more challenging was actually establishing a supply chain, because the farmers that we are buying from are small scale subsistence farmers, and they have got no chance, they’ve got no transport, they’ve got no effective efficient storage facilities to store their grain before it’s collected to take to market. All of this we had to establish from the beginning and really build a supply chain from the very beginning all the way through down to our storage and adding value here at the brewery in Maun.
That’s a massive challenge and it’s still ongoing. And now we are at the stage where we have many more farmers who want to hop on board and to be connected to the same market, so we would like to scale. But one of the big challenges now is not that there is a lack of farmers that want to sell and that want to practise elephant aware farming to coexist with elephants, but that there is a lack of infrastructure in the supply chain in order to key into this market. So we don’t just think about our manufacturing equipment and how to scale production here. We’ve got to think of actually how can we facilitate improvements in that supply chain infrastructure in order for more farmers to link to that market.
Obviously, I mentioned that we are a COVID business. Literally our first brew was brewed in February and March 2020, and the rest is history, as they say. So it took us two years to actually get to the point where we could actually open and sell our craft beer. So that was a major challenge for us as a startup business. Now that we are scaling, our challenge is getting out there and distributing the product. There’s big support for the brand in this country and a big desire for it to be present in many other places around the country, which we would like to do, but now we need to start looking at our supply chain and really focusing on the challenges, getting it into other parts of the country, and then soon after we would love to then export it.
How is Botswana doing in terms of going green?
Botswana is very much aligned with the green economy, which is really underpinned by the relevant policies and strategies that are focused on driving a sustainable economy and sustainable development through green economics. Botswana’s Vision 2036 really encapsulates that and outlines all of those sustainable development goals and the relevant policies and strategies. Historically, Botswana has really led the way, I would say, in terms of its conservation efforts and success stories around its conservation of its key ecosystems and the wildlife therein. Over 40% of the country are protected areas. It’s lucky in that respect, but that’s a result of some real foresight among the leadership. And that then translates into a burgeoning tourism industry, which, even in itself has pro-green economy strategies like ecotourism certificates, ecotourism standards, and green standards that really try and incentivise operators in the tourism industry to be more sustainable, to be more green-focused. And as a result, get a kind of competitive advantage, if you like. That is a good example of how Botswana is really pushing a green economy through its sustainable development goals.
I would say, a lot of it is dependent on the public sector and the Botswana government is doing as much as it can in that sector. But there’s still a gap in terms of how enterprise and private sector investment can really push the envelope in terms of green economies. We’re seeing it develop in certain areas like solar energy, for example, with some exciting solar energy projects popping up around the country for local scale energy supply. But really, across the different sectors, we are a little bit behind other countries in terms of the amount of investment going into specific green economy activities and the industry then benefiting from that. I see a big potential there that needs and is attractive for investment in the near future.
What is your vision for the green economy movement incorporating nature-based solutions on the continent?
Yes, this is where the Okavango Craft Brewery really contributes. I think what we are achieving is that we are really establishing an industry here in Northwestern Botswana in and around the Okavango Delta. Our goal is to diversify wildlife-based economy, which is predominantly is based on tourism, wildlife-based tourism. But we see another potential in incorporating this wildlife-based economy into other sectors, in our case, the food and beverage manufacturing industry.
So really, instead of agriculture and the agricultural value chains, which there’s a big need to develop and promote further in this country as well as neighbouring countries; instead of being opposed to conservation policies and conservation goals, why not merge them? Outside of protected areas, how can we generate an economy that benefits not just those employed by the tourism industry, but also the large percentage of people who are still subsistence farmers?
And so, by generating a value addition in terms of what the farmers are doing to coexist with wildlife and monetising that through the manufacturing of value added products that are sold back to the tourism industry with the story that generates the additional value, that really is trying to merge the different sectors under the banner of sustainable development, whereby the agricultural value chain is benefiting also from a wildlife economy, through the production of these products that are benefiting farmers who are making an effort to coexist with wildlife.
This is really our overall objective, and we believe that we’ve got proof of concept so far and we’re really excited about scaling this product and we are diversifying into other products as well, local food products to feed the people of Botswana and neighbouring countries. So yes, it’s an exciting space to be in and we’re really looking forward to developing it further in the near future.
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