Small-scale farming unsustainable, SA must train new commercial farmers : expert

South Africa had to produce 100,000 new, skilled farmers in the next seven years if the country’s commercial agricultural sector was to remain productive, a farming consultant has said.

“If government meets its target of handing over 30% of the country’s productive commercial agricultural land to black farmers by 2014, it would have redistributed 20-million hectares. If this land was divided into plots of an average 200ha; 100,000 new farms would have been created, and each one would need to be run by a farmer,” Buhle Farmers Academy consultant Johan Roos said.

The government’s land reform policy includes establishing new black commercial farmers, but has so far focused on sourcing land and providing support for small-scale farmers. Where large commercial farms have been handed over, the beneficiaries have almost all been communities, not individual farmers.

Subsistence and small-scale farming was useful, said Roos, but it would not sustain South African agriculture. “We must get away from the idea that African farmers do not need fertilisers. Why must African farmers be satisfied with producing half a ton of maize per hectare while they could be producing 10?”

African governments favour small-scale farming because it is typically low in technology and a small capital investment allows more people to become economically active. High costs of commercial agriculture are a barrier to entry and the use of genetically modified organisms are seen to threaten access to export markets.

In countries such as Zambia and Malawi, small-scale farmers provide most of their countries’ domestic maize requirements. African governments have been reluctant to tamper with this system, not least because this is where their political power lies.

Roos dismissed these conditions as unsustainable. “Foreign investors are clamouring to invest in African agriculture but they need a high-tech environment. Instead, we want it to be low-tech. It’s just not going to happen.” Africa’s agricultural potential was enormous, he said, but the continent was littered with agricultural projects that had not achieved their goals — often because some “ critical success factors were missing."

He enumerated these as land, credit, market access, water, technical expertise and support, government policy, equipment, producer price intervention, government grants and subsidies, export opportunities, infrastructure, and institutional development.

“They all have to be in place,” said Roos. He said the usual assumption was that land plus equipment plus money would result in success and that, to a large extent, the government was providing this to new farmers. This assumption, however, lacked “the most important component” — human capital. “To transform subsistence farmers into commercial farmers, we have to transfer applied technical knowledge and practical farming and business skills, coupled with continuous mentorship .”

Roos said what the developing agricultural sector needed was to equip new, young farmers not to find jobs on farms, but to establish their own farming businesses.

Buhle Farmers’ Academy had trained 1,327 new farmers since 2000 on its 150ha farm, Roos said. It receives no government support but is backed by banks, food companies and agricultural chemicals companies such as Monsanto and Omnia.

Business Day