Encouraged by favourable current and short-term future national maize prices, South Africa’s crop farmers have indicated that they are likely to plant about 9,7%, or 229 900ha, more land to maize this coming summer than during the 2010/11 summer.
However, the Crop Estimates Committee cautioned that this figure could change if rains were late or excessive. The 229 900ha increase was likely to comprise 145 900ha of white maize and 84 000ha of yellow.
Up to 21 October of the 2011 grains marketing season, South Africa had already exported a massive 1 591 273t of maize, 942 807t of which was white and 648 466t yellow. Mexico and South Korea were the main recipients. A total of 608 456t of white maize went to Mexico while 304 660t of yellow maize was exported to South Korea.
Grain SA’s manager for industry services, Nico Hawkins, said that production cost calculations for the
current maize crop showed that farmers needed R1 400/t to R1 600/t at farm gate prices to cover their costs.
The Safex price needed to be R1 700/t to R1 900/t for farmers to make a small profit. The current Safex price for yellow maize was about R2 287/t and for white maize, about R2 380/t. However, while the Safex white maize price stood at R2 175/t for May 2012, this dropped to R1 865,60/t for July 2012. For yellow maize, the Safex prices for these two months dropped to R1 950/t and R1 870/t respectively.
“Our figures show that there’s unlikely to be any carry-over maize stocks from the current marketing season into next year’s marketing season,” Hawkins added. Lorenz Freese, manager of Deeside Farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, said he would be planting more maize this year as the prices were currently attractive enough to encourage additional maize plantings.
Rodney Dredge of the estimates committee said that preliminary estimates of intentions to plant for the 2011/12 summer showed that farmers intended to plant 460 000ha (418 000ha: 2010/11) to soya beans and 58 000ha (55 150ha: 2010/11) to groundnuts.
By contrast, planned plantings for three major crops were lower than last season’s figures. Intentions for sunflower were estimated at 555 000ha (642 700ha: 2010/11); for sorghum, 47 200ha (69 200ha: 2010/11); and for dry beans, 35 000ha (41 900ha: 2010/11).
In total, it is anticipated that SA will be planting 3 757 400ha of crops this season compared with 3 599 250ha for last summer.
Meanwhile, the CEC’s third production forecast for 2011’s winter cereal crop revealed that the estimate for wheat had been revised down 3,2%, or 61 000t, to 1 841 630t from 604 700ha at an average yield of 3,05t/ha.
“The decrease in the expected production of wheat can mainly be attributed to unfavourable weather conditions in some provinces,” Dredge explained. – Lloyd Phillips
