Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
“Wait, I have to tell my father how much you paid for these baby goats,” said Clive.
His father is mostly deaf, and I heard through the bakkie window how Clive shouted: “One thousand five hundred rand” and “ingane yembuzi”, which translates to baby goats in isiZulu.
I felt I had to defend my investment in dwarf goats. Carefully lifting one of the tiny but very cute kids from the shoebox, I took it over to the old induna where he was sitting in the shade of the ancestral rondavel.
Fully grown, the dwarf goats stand about knee high, and I knew I wasn’t going to impress the canny old goat farmer with how much meat they produce. Instead, I had Clive explain to his father how dwarf goats almost never get sick, seem to survive on anything they can chew and best of all, they breed like rabbits.
The bucks start covering the does at four months and the females are mature at eight months. They breed all year round and produce two to four kids every five months. On average, a doe lives between 15 and 20 years.
It is all in the planning
The old man was silent for a long time as he pondered all this. I could see him doing the math in his head, but his next
statement surprised me.
“He says you now have to think like Toyota,” Clive translated for me. “Don’t just think what you can win. Think what can go wrong and plan around that.”
“You must plan to introduce the best parts of the small goats to our flocks without also introducing their smallness,” the old man warned.
Pointing to my Hilux, he added: “You must think like the Toyota Gazoo racing team. Test everything before you race ahead.”
Clive and I are a team in the local rally races, using my stock standard Hilux in the Clubman’s Class. His father likes watching dashcam footage of our races and loves attending the local drifting competitions.
He claims it is for the precision steering on display, but Clive suspects the young ladies at these events also have a part to play in his father’s newfound interest …
Rally class technology
His father now proceeded to lecture us how Toyota became the world’s top seller of vehicles. “Toyota has been racing since the 1970s, when I was still working as a mechanic at the gold mines. Back then we watched Formula One, NASCAR, IndyCar
and the WRC.
“The racing was exciting, but I enjoyed even more seeing how Toyota would put the parts that won them podiums in their normal cars.
“Now, these small goats of yours I know. They are popular in Kenya, where you may recall Toyota had again won first to fourth places in last year’s rally championship, for the second year running.
“But they only won because team principal had pointed out the new Yaris was not performing as expected over rough gravel sections.
“The engineers and mechanics worked hard on the issue, and they ensured that the Toyota Gazoo racing ream won for the third year in a row. To win, you must work like them with your small goats,” the induna told me through Clive.
… in everyday cars
Asked how a goat herd can work like a mechanic, he replied: “Plan properly and then test every idea”.
“That will take long,” I said. “It may take me 20 years to breed all the good traits of the dwarf goats into our flock without losing size.”
“Then spend the time,” the old man said. “When Toyota started racing, they did not win immediately. In fact, despite making Formula One engines for other teams, they never won an F1 title.
Read more about the benefits of manufacturing car parts locally.
“Instead, we as the customers are the winners, because Toyota now has a GR line that gives you everything they learned in endurance racing and rallies and drifting, giving us race-tested cars that perform beyond your wildest dreams.”
