The Rural Sociology Group offers a possibility to do your master thesis about organic wine production in South Africa.

As organic wine production cannot make use of pesticides, wine growers search for other ways to control the weeds in the vineyard, for example by mowing or burning.
More recently, the idea has come up to let sheep graze in the vineyards, see for example http://news.ucanr.org/newsstorymain.cfm?story=977: “If sheep avoid grapes, they can graze the floor of a vineyard, providing farmers an alternative to using herbicides and mowing.”

Although organic wine is also produced in South Africa, this idea has neither been studied nor applied in there. This offers interesting possibilities for a master thesis.

The research will be carried out under supervision of Rural Sociology (Birgit Boogaard) en Rural Development Sociology (Paul Hebinck) and in cooperation with the Unversity of Stellenbosch and an organic winegrower in South Africa – who is very interested in this concept.

If you are interested, just send me an email (birgit.boogaard@wur.nl ) for further information.

Best regards,
Birgit.