This article discusses the outlook for South Africa's agriculture in the coming year, highlighting the challenges and opportunities faced by the sector.
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.This is likely to be a year of recovery for South Africa's agriculture. Photographer: Michele Spatari/Bloomberg via Getty Images, but they were late in regions such as Delmas in Mpumalanga, as well as various parts of Limpopo and the Free State. This put a strain on grazing veld and delayed summer crop planting.
Still, the overall agricultural production conditions promise to be better than in 2024, which was characterised by the mid-summer drought and animal disease. South Africa has progressed notably in controlling the spread of foot-and-mouth and other animal diseases such as avian influenza and African swine fever. This puts the livestock and poultry subsector in an ideal position to rebuild, provided the grazing veld and yellow maize production, a primary feed, recovers. Better dam levels and a stable electricity supply for irrigation will continue to benefit the horticulture subsector — fruit and vegetables — and floriculture.Let us be honest, the year we have left behind was difficult. Five critical events and themes dominated the South African agricultural scene. Combined, they resulted in a mixed performance across the different agricultural subsectors in 2024. First, we started the 2023-24 production season (this is the 2024 calendar year) aware that it would be a mild El Niño year, but the timing of it was uncertain at the start of the season. Consensus from various early forecasts showed that it would intensify from March onwards. Theoretically, this would not be the worst timing for farmers because the crop would have passed the pollination stages requiring moisture. As a result, we had assumed that South Africa would still achieve a decent harves
SOUTH AFRICA AGRICULTURE El Nino Drought Animal Diseases Recovery
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