The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is extensively employed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation to monitor crop yields and vegetation productivity.Farmers aren’t against the use of satellite maps, but they want drought evaluations to include veld inspections on the ground. They also want to see more testing of the NDVI before it’s used again by the agriculture department for determining drought relief.
Satellite mapping tracks rainfall through evapotranspiration rates of vegetation, and scientists don’t have to rely on accurate rainfall figures, which have become difficult to obtain. But farmers complain that small clusters of pixels on the satellite images lead to problems in interpreting the data.
Burnt veld, bare lands and spekboom thickets all create “false readings”, so the satellite doesn’t pick up farms that are hardest hit by the drought. The maps are supposed to give an objective picture of the relative condition of drought across the landscape in terms of a plant production index. However, this means a farmer in Butterworth, in the east of the province, where the average annual rainfall may be 750mm, is just as likely to qualify for help as a farmer in Aberdeen, where the average annual rainfall may be 280mm.
Farmers also contend that lack of funds and administrative bungling are major problems.Furthermore, only a fraction of farms that suffer serious drought have a hope of receiving relief, as the more farmers who apply for aid, the more stringent the criteria become to qualify for it.
In addition, the Eastern Cape’s agriculture department is experiencing hiccups with controlling and paying out the allocated funds. For instance, many smaller farmers didn’t take up the offer of assistance because they couldn’t make the one-third deposit required for the feed. And there’s confusion about what happened to this money, which was never claimed.
