Grey days ahead for farming
SOUTHAfrica’s farmers, farmworkers, and agricultural scientists are following global trends and getting older. If youngsters aren’t interested in agriculture, where is the next generation of farmers and researchers to come from, not to speak of bountiful and affordable food?
While mature farmers have the experience and are less likely to make financial mistakes, young farmers are the potential entrepreneurs and producers. When farmers are older than the general population, rural communities as well as taxpayers can expect trouble as small towns cannot cope with even more aging, unproductive citizens. Already, unemployment rates in these areas are closer to 90 percent than to the official 25 percent.
Statistics are often out of date, but they suggest that the average age of commercial farmers and farmworkers even in First World countries such as the US and Australia is creeping towards 60 – when company executives prepare to retire.
While some districts and some branches of farming, such as game ranching, are attracting younger people (perhaps because jobs in other sectors have become so scarce) generally fewer and fewer fresh faces are seen at farmers’ meetings and rural sports clubs and churches. The emerging farming sector is also older than it could be, with members of mentorship projects often around 50 years of age and communal farmers in the pension bracket.
Money is probably the main reason why comparatively few youngsters are interested in commercial farming. In the case of communal areas, where any job is scarce, a recent study suggested that the growing indifference among the youth towards farming includes the notions that it’s an unattractive occupation and a struggle for survival.
While agricultural faculties annually accept hundreds of students, many of them study agriculture not out of choice but because they do not qualify for courses such as medicine or law. At universities servicing the former homelands, most students have never even been on a commercial farm, let alone worked on one. This does not auger well for the future of essential support programmes run by extension officers and advisers.
Good farmers are born, rather than made. Unfortunately, we are now losing even those born farmers to other sectors – or to the bottomless pit of unemployment. Naturally for young, energetic people to go farming they need to see it as an interesting, rewarding career.
The profitability of farming is best left to market forces, but the government can help bring more stability to the sector by guaranteeing land ownership and not doing anything that undermines land values, which are the pillars of the rural economy. Destroy farm values and the pack of cards collapses.
Young agricultural researchers are getting thin on the ground, too. For example, the Grassland Society of SA (GSSA) is so worried about the growing scarcity of expertise in planted pastures that it has launched a campaign to revitalise planted pastures as a scientific discipline. According to Dr Wayne Truter, chairman of GSSA, the dwindling numbers of planted pasture specialists, academics, and researchers is putting animal production at risk.
“South Africa’s dairy industry is primarily situated at the coast where it is reliant on planted pastures, but it is supported mainly by animal scientists,” he said. “With agriculture undergoing significant changes that carry serious financial implications, new technologies as well as more plant breeders will be needed. We will also have to entice students in the genetic sciences to become involved.”
Truter blamed the shortage of effective research and training on vacant posts in government institutions, run-down infrastructure, insufficient running capital, red tape and an absence of mentors and a lack of vision in the departments to prioritise research.
But the core of the problem is that the value of a thriving family-farm sector has been largely ignored in the big land debate, possibly because the South African family farm has simply been taken for granted – as if it has always been there and will continue to feed the nation and keep the rural economy going.
Things are changing out there, unnoticed by urbanites. Fifty years ago, when South Africa still had 150 000 commercial farmers, almost every urbanite personally knew a farmer – if they did not actually have an uncle or grandfather in the farming business.
Now, with fewer than 40 000 commercial farmers remaining – and their numbers still shrinking – city folk have all but lost touch with what is happening down on the ranch.
Small commercial farming enterprises are under increasing pressure across the globe. Reasons for this include globalisation, increased competition, escalating production costs, and droughts – factors that are usually out of the control of individual farmers.
In the US, of all the farms with a turnover of R8 million or more, 88 percent are family farms run by well-educated, albeit aging, farmers using sophisticated methods and little labour. They account for nearly 80 percent of production. But smaller operators struggle and have to rely on off-farm income.
Although family farms make up most of Australia’s farming industry, between 1971 and 2006 that country’s family farms declined by 46 percent to about 100 000 in total. Today, only 16 percent of these farmers are under the age of 45.
In South Africa, corporate farming businesses now own 5 percent of irrigated farms and produce 30 percent of the national crop while more than one million small-scale farmers produce only 5 percent. Familyowned farms produce the remaining 65 percent.
Despite the official focus on establishing new small-scale farmers in South Africa, the table is set for an increase in big company farms that can churn out food in factory-like precision at lower costs per unit and can ride the boom-and-bust cycles that govern farming profits.
Big companies are better equipped to manage and train their labour force. More and more, landowners are in future likely to lease, rather than sell, their land to bigger operators or to farm on contract, especially if land reform policies succeed in forcing down farm values. This could reduce the number of good farms coming on to the market to the extent that land values could eventually go the other way – and skyrocket.
Meanwhile, however, family farms remain a reliable measure of a country’s rural economic health. Districts in which the original family farms – some going back to the mid-1800s – are still largely intact, mirror a successful agricultural sector supported by a favourable climate and soils, and marketable products. Over generations, the combination of these attributes has enticed at least one son to not only make farming his livelihood, but to further expand and improve the family business. These farms were not built in a day – they grew in increments over generations of dedication and hard work.
On the other hand, many families found that trying to maintain a farm out of sheer sentiment is not an option. For older farmers, in particular, it is hard to let go. Ingrid Muenstermann, of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, sums it up well by asking if the Australian family farm, for the older generation, is too bad to stay on or too good to leave. But she found that the young generation does not believe that family farming offers a secure livelihood or future.
“Young people provide energy, fresh ideas, future leadership, and hope. Their presence in numbers and their talent are symbolic of the future prospects of a farming town. Their departure for the bright lights signals the loss of these markers of likely future success, particularly if they stay away,” she noted.
Dotted across South Africa, deserted farm homesteads and workers’ cottages bear witness to the changing socio-economic rural landscape. Saving the family farm in its present form will be difficult if farmers are not properly trained in all aspects of farming, including the latest technology – and get at least some support from the taxpayer.
That will not necessarily mean more jobs. New techniques bring greater production per unit, but fewer hands are needed to generate the goods. For example, even in South Africa, genetically modified crops have led to higher yields, but the advent of mammoth, computerised tractors and bigger implements has already put thousands of tractor drivers out of work.
In the US, over the past 70 years or so, milk production per cow has increased four times – but the number of cows has plummeted while the herds have become bigger and fewer. During the same period, the time needed to produce a bushel of maize fell from 100 hours of labour to two hours. Generally, US farm output is now said to be about 180 percent above its level 60 years ago. And still climbing.
For South African consumers to look forward to the same kind of progress will depend on thevalue they place on the family-farm concept.
Bezuidenhout is a livestock farmer and freelance journalist. THECLASS-ORIENTED and red metalworkers – all of us as loyal and disciplined activists and cadres of the ANC – send our revolutionary and best wishes to the ANC leaders on this august occasion of the ANC’s 101 years of existence.
For many decades, generations of workers and trade unionists in our country, with progressive intelligentsia, women, student and youth formations and democrats, have helped in rebuilding and radicalising the ANC to take forward the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
The ANC was formed on January 8, 1912. It was formed to unite the African people across ethnic divide, particularly the Black African working class. The formation of the ANC was a response to the racially exclusive 1910 Union of South Africa settlement. The formation of the ANC was also necessitated by the colonial dispossession of the Black African majority of their land by colonist invaders.
Hence this 101st anniversary of the existence of the ANC coincides with the passing of the infamous Land Act of 1913, which sealed the dispossession of land from the Black African majority by the past order. This calls on the ANC to accelerate the redistribution of land to the Black African majority.
For more than 10 decades, the ANC has led a selfless struggle for national liberation and people’s power, expressing the collective interests and aspirations of our people of building a non-racial, nonsexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa.
As we celebrate the ANC’s 101 years of struggle, we are also conscious of the major advances ushered in by the ANC towards consolidating our National Democratic Revolution.
But these advances are being reversed by the untransformed apartheid capitalist economy which continues to reproduce the triple crises of racialised and gendered inequality, poverty and unemployment. This calls on the ANC to implement a radical political project anchored in the Freedom Charter to nationalise key sectors of our economy.
The key challenge faced by our movement is to address the scandalous socio-economic conditions faced by our people as evidenced by violent and daily service delivery protests, the scourge of corruption ravaging our country, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and continued struggles by workers in factories, mines and farms for a living and unprecedented high levels of unemployment faced by the working class youth.
Our people, particularly the workers and the poor, look upon the ANC to change this situation.
We commit ourselves to rally behind the elected leadership of the ANCactively to participate in the implementation of the progressive resolutions or outcomes of the ANC’s 53rd National Conference, to foster unity within the ANC and the alliance.
As Numsa we strongly believe that a strong, active, focused and campaigning ANC is critical for the realisation of the goals of the Freedom Charter.
Statement issued by the National Union of Metalworkers in SA national office bearers