Andrê Cyril Myburgh was born in Somerset West and raised in the Strand. He attended Strand Primary School and Hottentots Holland High School and studied Agriculture at the University of Stellenbosch (BSc Agric, MSc Agric, DSc).
He worked at the Fruit Research Institute, Stellenbosch, then part of the Department of Agriculture and later called Infruitec.
Became Commonwealth Fellow for 1950-1951 and spent a year studying research methods in fruit fly research at Cornell and Berkeley in the USA and spent 1 month in Hawaii with their research collaborators.
At the end of his career, he spent 3 years as Agricultural Advisor to the South African Ambassador in London.

Andrê Myburgh' s specialty was to study and control the insects affecting deciduous fruit. He developed a world-first method for the control of Mediterranean and Natal fruit flies in deciduous fruit orchards. (The pesticide, Lebaycid (Bayer), is still in use to this day.) He then established a method for quantifying insect load/build-up in orchards based on the now well-known phenomenon of pheromone-attractant baiting.
He wrote more than 225 publications on pest and pest control for Agricultural Journals and Bulletins and in more popular literature: Farmer's Weekly and Landbou Weekblad. He produced and edited 5 Handbooks on Entomological Pests which are still used by students, lecturers and consultants in the field.
In the early 1960's, he was an office bearer (secretary) of a group of entomologists who were agricultural delegates to the United Nations. He was an active member of the international Pomological Society.
Andrê Myburgh married Lois Flight, originally from USA, in 1952. They had three daughters and one son.
His hobbies were vegetable gardening, fishing from the rocks in False Bay and mountain climbing. He also brought elements of his work into his hobbies, namely identifying the pests affecting proteas and the treatment and cold storage which made exportation possible. He was very concerned with the diminishing numbers of Disa unfilora in the local mountains and gained a permit to harvest and cultivate (multiply) them for posterity. This included the rare pure yellow disa which was subsequently stolen from its habitat in the Porterville mountains. His photographs of the indigenous flowers of the Cape mountains were used on the front covers of the Farmer's Weekly for a whole year in the late 1960's.
His favourite saying was: "'n Boer maak 'n plan!" "A farmer makes a plan"

      Books