Oudtshoorn Ostrich Farms: Feather Fashion, Farming and the Klein Karoo

In the dry valley of the Klein Karoo, between the folded ridges of the Swartberg and the mountains that wall it off from the coast, the town of Oudtshoorn owes almost everything it once was to a single bird. A century ago, ostrich feathers were among the most valuable things South Africa sold to the world, and the farmers and merchants of Oudtshoorn grew rich enough to build sandstone mansions with turrets and stained glass. Then fashion changed, the market collapsed, and the town had to find another way to live. The Oudtshoorn ostrich farms you can visit today are the inheritors of that boom and bust. On Day 4 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group leaves Cape Town for Oudtshoorn and spends time on one of them.

The Klein Karoo: a valley between mountains

The Klein Karoo, or Little Karoo, is a long valley lying between the Swartberg to the north and the Langeberg and Outeniqua mountains to the south. Oudtshoorn is its largest town. The country here is dry, open and scrubby, very different from the green coast a short distance away on the other side of the Outeniquas, and farming it has always depended on water drawn from rivers and irrigation.

The mountains to the north are part of the story too. The Swartberg Pass, which climbs out of the valley towards Prince Albert, was completed by the road engineer Thomas Bain with convict labour and opened on 10 January 1888, at the height of the first ostrich era. It is still an unsurfaced road, and much of the Swartberg range is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The pass is not on the tour’s itinerary, but its peaks are the backdrop to every farm in the valley.

How wild birds became a farm industry

Ostriches were hunted for their plumes long before anyone farmed them. From the mid-1860s, farmers in the Cape began keeping the birds instead and plucking their feathers, and the feather exports rose sharply. One of the pioneers was Arthur Douglass, who patented an incubator for ostrich eggs and is described as probably the first man in Africa to breed ostriches as his whole business. Hatching eggs artificially meant flocks could be built up far faster than in nature.

Oudtshoorn’s farmers followed the money. As ostriches proved more profitable than their other crops, they cleared fields and planted lucerne (alfalfa) to feed the birds. The irrigated green camps of lucerne that still patch the valley floor are part of that inheritance. By the late 1870s, a breeding pair of ostriches could sell for as much as £1,000.

Part of the appeal was the bird itself. The ostrich is the largest and heaviest living bird. A male stands about 2.1 to 2.7 metres tall and weighs 100 to 130 kilograms; it has just two toes on each foot and can sprint at around 70 kilometres an hour. And unlike a hunted bird, a farmed ostrich could be plucked again and again.

The feather boom and the feather barons

There were two great booms: the first from about 1865 to 1870, and the second, much larger, from around 1900 to 1914. Ostrich plumes were the height of fashion on the hats and fans of Edwardian Europe and America, and weight for weight they were said to be worth almost as much as diamonds. In 1913, the South African ostrich industry reached its peak with more than 775,000 birds, and feathers ranked fourth among the country’s exports, behind gold, wool and diamonds.

The trade drew merchants as well as farmers. Sephardic Jewish traders from North Africa were among the first to deal in feathers here, and from the 1890s families arrived from Lithuania, mostly from the towns of Kelmė and Šiauliai. About a hundred Jewish families settled in Oudtshoorn during the boom, building synagogues in 1888 and 1896 and opening South Africa’s first Hebrew school in 1904; the town became known as the Jerusalem of Africa. One of the best known of the new arrivals was Max Rose, who came to Oudtshoorn in 1890 at the age of 17 as a feather buyer, moved into lucerne and ostrich farming, and became known as the Ostrich King.

The stakes were high enough to inspire one of the strangest episodes in the history of South African farming. In 1911 the government backed the Trans-Saharan Ostrich Expedition, led by Russell Thornton, to buy Barbary ostriches in French Sudan, prized for their plumes, and bring them home. Parliament set aside up to £7,000 for the attempt, while making clear it would disown the team if they were caught. They did bring a flock back, but the birds were never successfully bred into the South African stock.

The feather palaces of Oudtshoorn

The wealth of the boom is still visible in Oudtshoorn’s streets. Around 1910, the most successful farmers and merchants built mansions now known as the feather palaces: houses of local sandstone fitted out with Dutch stained glass, Belgian roof tiles, Italian marble and British fireplaces, with turrets, deep verandas and cast-iron lace. Two architects shaped much of the town’s building in this period, the British-born Charles Bullock and the Dutch-born Johannes Egbertus Vixseboxse.

Several palaces survive. Welgeluk, built by the Olivier family in 1910, is now a guesthouse; Pinehurst serves as a residence for teachers; Rietfontein is still owned by the Potgieter family. The best way to see the period from the inside is the CP Nel Museum, housed in a former boys’ high school designed by Bullock and opened in 1907. Its Ostrich Hall covers the feather trade and the fashions it served, a Jewish gallery reconstructs the town’s 1896 synagogue, and the ticket includes the Le Roux Townhouse, a feather palace furnished in period style.

Why the feather market collapsed in 1914

The end came quickly. The outbreak of the First World War cut off markets and turned fashion towards austerity; there had been overproduction; and the arrival of open-topped motor cars made large feathered hats impractical. Campaigners against cruelty to birds also turned opinion against plumes, though in the case of ostriches they wrongly believed the birds were killed for their feathers.

For Oudtshoorn the consequences were severe. About 80 per cent of ostrich farmers went bankrupt, and many birds were released or slaughtered. The national flock fell to 314,000 by the end of the war and to just 32,000 by 1930. The town’s Jewish community, which had grown with the trade, roughly halved between 1918 and 1936 as families moved away.

From feathers to meat, leather and seed

Ostrich farming survived by changing what it sold. Today the main products are meat, leather and feathers, and South Africa accounts for around three-quarters of the world’s ostrich meat. About 80 per cent of the country’s ostrich production comes from the Western Cape.

The modern industry has had its own crises. In April 2011 an outbreak of H5N2 bird flu in the Klein Karoo led to the culling of about 37,000 ostriches and stopped exports of meat to the European Union, the industry’s main market at the time. Further outbreaks and trade restrictions followed in later years, and the number of registered ostrich production units fell from about 1,000 before 2011 to about 350 by 2021. Oudtshoorn has diversified as a result: seed production is now the area’s largest economic contributor, alongside tourism to the farms, the caves and the mountains.

Do I have to ride an ostrich on an Oudtshoorn ostrich farm?

No. The tour’s farm visit includes a tour of the farm, the chance to feed the birds and the option of riding one, and every part of it is optional. Attitudes to riding have changed: in 2017 two of Oudtshoorn’s best-known show farms, the Cango Ostrich Show Farm and the Safari Ostrich Show Farm, stopped offering rides, citing welfare concerns raised by visitors. Farms that still offer rides set weight limits for riders; one set its limit at 74 kilograms. Many travellers choose to watch and learn rather than ride, and that is entirely your decision.

Can I see inside a feather palace on the tour?

Not as part of the planned programme. Day 4 combines the ostrich farm with an afternoon at the Cango Caves, so there is no scheduled time at the CP Nel Museum or the Le Roux Townhouse. You will pass through Oudtshoorn itself, where several feather palaces can be seen from the street, and the group spends the night in town at the Queens Hotel.

How much walking does the Oudtshoorn day involve?

A moderate amount, spread across the day. A farm visit of this kind typically involves short walks around the camps and some standing while the farm and its birds are explained. In the afternoon, the shorter heritage route through the Cango Caves takes about an hour and stays within the large front chambers, avoiding the tight squeezes and steep climbs of the longer adventure route. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day and walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

Oudtshoorn on the Southern Africa route

Day 4 is one of the fullest on the tour. After the farm visit, the afternoon is spent underground at the Cango Caves, the limestone cave system in the foothills of the Swartberg. The route then moves on to Knysna, where Day 5 is spent at the Featherbed Nature Reserve on the lagoon’s Western Head, reached only by ferry. Our guide to South Africa’s Garden Route covers the wider coast.

Seen from the farm, Oudtshoorn makes a neat lesson in how distant markets shape a landscape. The same ships that had carried Cape wine to Europe, a story told in our article on the Constantia wine route, carried feathers a century later, and when Europe’s tastes changed, the Klein Karoo felt it at once. Our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey follows that thread through the rest of the route, to Johannesburg’s gold and the national parks of the north.

Standing at a lucerne camp with the Swartberg behind, it is hard to imagine that these birds once paid for turrets and Italian marble. But the feather palaces are still there in town, and so is the industry that outlived the crash. A morning on an Oudtshoorn ostrich farm is an unexpected window onto how South Africa’s fortunes were made, lost and remade.