My story
I have always been a geographer at heart. I was the top geography student in my school in Pretoria, and I went on to study Geo-Informatics at the University of Pretoria, on a performance bursary, tutoring second-year geography along the way.
My career began in agricultural mapping and grew into national earth observation. At the Agricultural Research Council's Institute for Soil, Climate and Water I led the national CRID project for drought and vegetation monitoring, working with MODIS and AVHRR satellite imagery to track drought, land degradation and climate variability across South Africa. I co-authored scientific papers, presented my work at IGARSS in Anchorage, Alaska, and was a delegate at the GEO Ministerial Summit in Cape Town.
In 2011 I joined Manstrat Agricultural Intelligence Solutions as a Remote Sensing Specialist, and within just over two years I was leading its GIS Division. My team built national systems for fire warnings, grazing capacity and crop monitoring, grew the company's infrastructure mapping from 20 to more than 50 datasets, and brought NOAA weather data into the agricultural forecasts that farmers and government relied on every week.
When Manstrat closed in early 2019, I chose to close that chapter too. I loved the work, but staying "current" in the profession had become a treadmill of professional-body registrations, compulsory training points and fees, and it was crowding out the work itself. I moved to the United States, through the long years of pandemic travel restrictions, and started again from the ground up.
Starting over taught me a great deal about people. I worked on a shop floor, a school playground and a grocery floor, then turned a brand-new business centre into a fully working one. Since 2026 I have been a Firm Administrator: I run a law firm's daily operations, notarize documents and witness Will and Trust signings, and I designed and built the firm's website and the internal applications that run its work.
The maps never really left me. In my own time I rebuilt the kind of weather and agricultural products I used to make, from free global weather models, for South Africa and for home, north of Boston. They will live on this site.