Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
Agri-Expo restructures to ensure sustainability
Agri-Expo, formerly the Cape of Good Hope Agricultural Society and the oldest such society in South Africa, recently downscaled its staff and projects in an attempt to improve its sustainability.
As part of this process, Breyton Milford, who had previously served as the non-profit organisation’s operations manager, was appointed as its new CEO.
Milford confirmed in a statement that 10 staff members had been retrenched, leaving the organisation with only four employees. Some of the retrenched staff members would, however, continue to work for the organisation, as needed, on a contract basis.
“Our ex-staff members are experts in their fields, so it’ll make sense to employ them on some of our projects,” he said.
Milford said that Agri-Expo’s council had set its focus on the wine industry, with the South African Young Wine Show being the biggest priority for now. The organisation would also concentrate on the dairy industry (specifically the South African Dairy Championships), support for agricultural schools, and the shows for its members.
“We’re starting with a blank canvas and will see how we can do things differently to add value to projects. We’ll see how things grow from here,” Milford said. The “inevitable restructuring” was blamed on significant losses due to projects not generating a profit during the past couple of years and the poor economic climate.
Milford told Farmer’s Weekly that the events industry had suffered due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, but the main problem was that Agri-Expo had been “living off interest from its investments that were no longer growing well because of the poor economic climate”.
“Our large salary bill, which has since been cut by more than 70%, forced the company to cut deeper and deeper into its investments.”
In the statement, Pieter van Wyk, president of Agri-Expo, said problems arising during the past couple of years had been structural in nature.
“We had to bring our expenditure in line with our income. If we [hadn’t] made these hard decisions now, this 192-year-old agricultural society would have had to close its doors in about 10 years,” he said.