Protect, restore and value Water Source Areas

BERNO Hambrock had little choice. The lingering devastation of the drought and stricter biosafety regulations meant he had to get his old-fashioned pig farm up to scratch – fast.

It was either that or close his business, like the neighbouring ruined piggery he gestures to, which stands abandoned, a ghostly reminder of the drought.

“Everything got tougher because of the drought,” says Hambrock, a tall, proud pig farmer, on his farm tucked in the deep valleys between Paulpietersburg and Vryheid, in the remote northern reaches of KwaZulu-Natal.

“The maize price went up. We had to drill boreholes because our dams and river dried up… You had to be efficient to survive. A lot of people didn’t,” he says.

So, Hambrock secured a R25-million loan to upgrade his piggery. And it’s paid off. In the past two years, his farm has cut its water use by half by rolling out modern and efficient technology.

Previously, water tests had revealed the extent of how slurry from his pigs was contaminating the local river.

“All the slurry, fresh water and rain water used to mix,” says Sthembiso Mhlongo, the quality assurance manager.

“In the old days, once our dams were full, there was a big problem because it all ended up in the river. Now, we don’t even need the dams anymore and we use the slurry to make compost that we sell to other farmers. It feels better to work like this.”

The improvements have brought a sense of renewed hope.

“We need to do things differently,” says Hambrock. “We save because we use less water. By cleaning up our act, we’ve become more efficient.”

The drought, which tur ned almost all of the country into disaster areas, has woken South Africans up to the “realisation that water stress is the new normal… We’ve been forced to reconsider the way we use water”, says conservation group WWF-South Africa.

Hambrock’s piggery was a stop in WWF-SA’s biannual recent Journey of Water, which documents the passage of water from its mountainous sources “to the tap”.

This year, it focused on the Ekangala/Drakensberg strategic water source area, which snakes around the escarpment and feeds farms and industries in the critical Tugela, Pongola and Vaal rivers.

Water Source Areas refer to the 8% of South Africa’s fragile land areas that produce half of its surface water – consider only 16% are safeguarded.

Christine Colvin, the WWF-SA’s senior freshwater scientist, says South Africans need to “fundamentally rethink” water and its place in the economy.

Too often, development is planned without considering “ecological infrastructure” – the catchments, rivers, wetlands and aquifers – that are the foundation of water supplies… It’s about securing these water source areas for future water security,” she believes.

“SA is a naturally dry country, we only get half the rainfall that is the world average for rainfall. So far, we’ve done pretty well in terms of building dams and engineered infrastructure to give us the water we need… But in the future, with climate change, that’s not going to be enough.”

Less rain is predicted in the western half of the country, and there will potentially be more intense flood events in the east.

“Climate change ... is likely to exacerbate the current pressure on SA’s water resources,” she says, explaining how warmer temperatures would lead to more algal blooms, making water in the country’s dams unfit for use.

On a lonely road between Vryheid and Louwsburg, Samir RanderaRees’s shoes crunch on a mound of bone-dry earth.

Here, overgrazing has caused large-scale erosion that has destroyed the landscape, causing deep sterile gulleys in the earth. It’s a concern for the Manzaan River and Bizane Dam.

Randera-Rees, the water source area manager for WWF-SA, seems shocked by the apocalyptic scene. “This is pretty terrible because you can see how the erosion runs right up there on those mountains.”

Agricultural experts estimate that SA loses 13 tons of fertile topsoil for every hectare of farmland each year from erosion, a loss worsened by the drought.

“Huge volumes of soil are washed away into rivers and dams.

“As you can imagine those dams, fill up with silt. That means less water for us to use,” offers Rees.

That sediment could end up in the Bivane Dam.

But its manager, Dawie Cronje, looking out at its vast expanse, says for now, its water is crystal-clear. Cronje wants to keep it that way.

The Bivane Dam is the largest privately owned surface dam in South Africa, that supplies the Pongola region with water.

It supplies water to 260 000 rural water users, and feeds the local sugar and fruit farming industry.

The dam, which was completed 17 years ago, has brought water security to the drought-prone region. “But we were still heavily affected