Nick Serfontein Built the Sernick Group From Thirty Bonsmara Heifers

Who is Nick Serfontein?

Nick Serfontein is the founder and chairman of the Sernick Group, a Free State beef business that links a Bonsmara stud, a performance-testing station, two feedlots, an abattoir and butchery retail. The Agri Orbit profile of the Sernick story reports that he was born in 1948 and grew up on the farm Liebenbergstroom, about 8 km from Edenville.

At his parents' urging he studied engineering at the University of Pretoria instead of agriculture, and he built a career as a consulting engineer while remaining, as the profile puts it, a farmer at heart.

How did the Sernick Bonsmara stud start?

In 1983 he bought his first farm, Vredeverwag, with 30 commercial Bonsmara heifers and a bull. The same year he registered the Sernick Bonsmara stud. Bonsmara is a South African composite breed, and the stud became the base for everything that followed.

The Phase C testing station opened in 1990 and was the group's first expansion. Phase C is the stage at which young bulls are performance tested side by side. The same profile reports that more than 10,000 bulls have been tested there, about 5,000 of them Sernick bulls, and that the centre now tests roughly 600 bulls a year.

Adding feed, slaughter and retail

Rising input costs relative to commodity prices forced a change. Serfontein considered four options: buy more land, produce more on the same land, diversify, or add value. He pursued all four, beginning in the mid-1990s, and has described the path as costly, with high school fees along the way.

The feedlot started in 1996. The group today reports two feedlots with room for 20,000 steers, a feed factory with capacity of 12,000 tons a month, and a Kroonstad abattoir that is export certified, with capacity for 6,000 cattle and 1,000 sheep a month. Weaners are backgrounded in three phases: a 5-day adaptation phase, a 25-day veld phase and a 14-day preparation phase.

Retail came last. The group runs four butcheries, three Country Meat outlets and one Roots franchise, with more planned. Its target sales mix is exports 20 percent, wholesale 10 percent, value-added products 20 percent, hotels, restaurants and caterers 10 percent, and retail 40 percent. Serfontein is quoted in the Sernick feature as saying retail is the point of direct contact with the consumer.

Scale and results

The group reports more than 11,000 hectares across neighboring farms, a 700-cow stud and a 1,000-cow commercial herd. For 2019 it reported turnover of R1.5 billion, 615 direct jobs and an impact on about 14,500 people directly or indirectly.

On the stud side it reports an intercalving period of 386 days, feed efficiency 22 percent better than the Bonsmara average, and 2019 production sale bulls averaging R105,000. Awards listed include ARC performance testing gold and silver in 1996, Elite Stud Herd of the Year in 2018 and 2019, and 22 Platinum Bull awards between 1996 and 2019.

Emerging farmers and community work

After many requests for help, Serfontein began running farmers' days and a carcass competition. A co-operation agreement with the Jobs Fund created the Sernick Emerging Farmer Programme, and the Serlaff Cooperative, with 59 black emerging farmers, was the pilot.

According to the emerging farmer section of the article, the cooperative received a Land Bank loan of R25 million in its first year, increased to R50 million in 2017. It lost about R589,000 in the 2016 drought and repaid the loan within the year. In 2017 it reported a profit of about R2.1 million, with R1.5 million paid out to members.

Sernick also sponsors schools, sports and churches, and maintains an 8 km provincial road from Edenville to Lindley. It opened a Future Farmers office in Kroonstad in August 2019. For more on how performance-tested seedstock shapes feeding, visit the farm.FM ranching section or read a farm.FM story on Bonsmara cattle.