From "The Kenya Farmer" August 1962 (Uit Tantie Marthie Davies se plakboeke.)

 From Habari Magazine (2013), Friends of East Africa Newsletter. J.C. Kopie Eksteen, the farmer featured here, previously owned Kapnyagi, now Chepkoilel North Secondary School, in Uasin Gishu County,

A well-known farmer from the Uasin Gishu, who represents that district on the Board of the Kenya Farmer's Association, is this month's personality. He is Mr J.C. (Kopie) Eksteen who, in his own words, "came to Kenya in 1931 and has never regretted it".

Born and brought up in the Eastern Transvaal, in the Maize Belt, Mr. Eksteen comes of a South African family with generations of farming behind them. When the depression hit the Union in the early 1930's his farther came to farm in Kenya and the family's growing accounts of Kenya as the perfect farming country persuaded their son to leave his studies at Witwatersrand University and join them at Sergoit. For several years before the war he took on any job that he could do in order, as he puts it, "to scrape together enough money" to start farming on his own account.

These included a period teaching at a farm school at Nanyuki and doing transport work for tea companies at Kericho. Joining up in 1940, he served in the 2nd/3rd Kings African Rifles in East Africa and Abyssinia until he was released on medical grounds. In 1942 Mr. Eksteen started his first farm at Moiben, at first leasing and later buying the land. Later he bought his late father's farm Sergoit farm and has since bought two other farms in the same district. He now lives on a 4½ thousand acre farm at Sergoit, the others being looked after by one European and one African manager.

On one of these farms Mr Eksteen is a partner of Mr. Lindsay G Troup, the agricultural expert, who during his visits to the country in the 1950s to prepare reports on behalf of the Kenya Government, decided to have an interest in Kenya farming. There is no monoculture on any of Mr Eksteen's farms. There is no monoculture on any of Mr. Eksteen's farms. On his main farm at Sergoit the emphasis is on wheat before cattle but on the farm owned in partnership with Mr. Troup the balance is practically equal. His views on farming are interesting, for farming is in his blood and he says he has never had the slightest desire to do anything else. "The true farmer"' Mr. Eksteen says, "gets his payment in results rather than in cash. It is a reward in itself to see trees grow where none grew before. Believe me, anybody who thinks they are going to farm solely for the money, they can get out of it or die of a broken heart".

Mr. Eksteen has been a director of the K.F.A. for the past 7 years and a member of the Association ever since he started farming. He is the K.F.A. nominee on the Cereal Producer's Board and on the Board of the Tanganyika Farmers Association. He has been on the Wheat Board since its inception in 1952 and was for six years on the Board of Unga Ltd. He served on the Council of the Dutch Reformed Church for 9 years.

Married to a Kenya born girl, he attributes much of his success to her help. Mrs. Eksteen was formerly Alida Steyn whose father, the late E.L. Steyn came to the Plateau in the first trek in 1908 and was at one time the largest wheat farmer in Eldoret and a well-respected figure. Himself the only son with five sisters, Mr. Eksteen has one boy and three girls, all of school age. He returned to the Union last year, for the first time since his arrival in Kenya 31 years ago, to take his son to school there. His devotion to Kenya is intense; he maintains that nowhere in the world could he have made such a success of farming, as he has been able to do here.

Mr Eksteen holds strong views on the role of organisations like the K.F.A. for he says without co-operatives of this kind farmers could not exist economically. But he considers that co-operation should be a two-way traffic and that if a farmer joins a co -operative and takes the benefits it can offer, he should be prepared to support it to the utmost.