Mass-planting spekboom to repair damaged farmlands in the Eastern Cape, paid for through the carbon markets, got supersized with the arrival of weighty Global North investment. Could this mark a new era for African agriculture, where farming soil carbon replaces conventional crops?

There are some forlorn-looking former ostrich camps in what is now the Kwandwe Private Game Reserve that have become a poster child for the repair of badly damaged farmlands in the Eastern Cape. Decades of ostrich and small-stock farming have stripped them to the hide. Where once there was impenetrable bush, today they may as well be a parking lot.

Even after 25 years of rest, the hard-packed ground has shown little sign of natural recovery, according to Kwandwe environment manager Craig Sholto-Douglas.

Fifteen years ago, though, the reserve's ecologist popped a bunch of spekboom cuttings into one camp. The experiment was low-tech, and low-cost: harvested nearby from wild-growing spekboom in a healthy thicket; sprigs, not much thicker than a finger, planted without roots; left to fend for themselves.

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It didn't take long for the plants to settle in.

The aim was to test a notion that had long been germinating within the Albany thicket ecology community: could mass-planting with this tough, drought-tolerant succulent help exhausted farmlands heal?

"The spekboom's done really well," says Sholto-Douglas, who regularly updates the thicket community on the camp's progress. "We're starting to see saplings and germinated seedlings of things like jacket plums and other...