Who Am I

My name is Nicolas Criticos. A few years ago, I left the structured world of electrical engineering and found myself in the Swartberg Karoo, living on a neglected olive farm called VrischGewagt. Thirteen years earlier, 16,000 olive trees had been planted here with a vision for what the land could become — but years of drought, financial strain, and neglect left almost all of them abandoned, with less than 1% still producing fruit.

What started as simply trying to rehabilitate olive trees slowly became something much deeper. I found myself learning how to repair pumps, manage water systems, host guests, maintain infrastructure, and carry the responsibility of keeping an entire farm alive — often with no roadmap and no certainty that it would work.

This journey has become about more than farming. It’s about rebuilding a relationship with the land, understanding what it truly takes to live sustainably, and documenting the raw reality behind creating a different way of life. Today, I’m restoring the farm block by block, tree by tree, while producing small batches of olive oil directly from the land as a way to support the process and continue the rehabilitation forward.