About me

I was born and raised in South Africa, my love and interest in all animals and nature was nurtured there. I had my first own dog to train, a German Shepherd Dog when I was sixteen, soon a border collie, Ace was added to my menagerie of birds, reptiles, horses and other animals. I was fanatical about training my dogs in various dog sports starting with obedience, tracking, companion dog, some showing, agility and with the border collie, sheepdog trials. After my university study (BSc), majoring in psychology and I traveled to Europe with my border collie Ace. In the Netherlands I met Eric and we continued on together. We were active in training and raising border collies and went trialling all over Europe. My best trialing achievements was twice 4 th on the Continental Sheepdog Championships and was Dutch Practical Sheepdog champion.

While we were living in the Netherlands we also had a small Quarter horse stud farm. We bred a few select foals each year from top quality reining and cutting blood lines.

In 1992 we started a grazing company and were hired with our flock of sheep, at times comprising of 1200 ewes, to graze nature areas, dykes, military grounds, parks, golf courses, heather regions and grass lands. We built up an extensive organic grazing company and advised in many other projects of this kind. Despite the fact that our company was doing very well, Eric and I did not want to live in the Netherlands much longer. We wanted a new challenge and wanted to live in a less populated country with lots of nature, our choice was Alberta, Canada.

When our visa was finalized we moved to Alberta at the end of august 2008.

We have bought our ranch comprising of 480 acres, bordering crown land and National Forest. On this ranch we will now concentrate on establishing a good commercial sheep farm, raising and training our border collies and sarplaninac livestock guardian dogs,
and of course raising our two wonderful children to love and respect nature and animals in general.
I started blogging in Dutch (www.grazerie.com/blog) to keep our family and friends informed to our activities here. As things turned out I really enjoyed doing this. Slowly my following grew and I decided to start up an English version of my Dutch blog and this is the result!
Welcome to my corner of the internet.