Farmers, the black sheep of the world?
As part of an in-house project to look at how Farmer’s Weekly has evolved over the past 107 years, a couple of colleagues and I recently visited the National Library...
New start for land reform department?
As the saying goes: be careful what you wish for. After the appointment of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of the ANC in December last year, and his subsequent election as...
Will technology end hunger?
South Africa is one of those countries in which you rarely have to travel far to witness first-hand the kind of disparity that exists in the supply of food.
SA’s maintenance emergency – time for change
As a journalist working for Farmer’s Weekly, you regularly get to experience the bumps, cracks, potholes and other obstacles that crowd out the smooth and flat parts of many provincial...
Land: SA’s real watershed moment
Ever since the National Assembly voted to pass a revised motion brought by the EFF to launch a process to change the Constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation,...
Climate change data cannot be faked
Now that all the most crucial changes on South Africa’s political landscape have come to pass, we can turn our attention for a moment to those challenges that will not...
Land audit reveals no great insight
Since land ownership, and agricultural land ownership in particular, remains one of South Africa’s most contentious issues, we should ideally have clear, independent and accurate data available to inform any...
A letter to farmers in drought-stricken regions
It’s a feeling anyone who has grown up on a farm knows well: the excruciating helplessness of looking out over your parched veld or crops and watching rain fall from...
Uncertainty is the new normal
Try to think back, and ask yourself if two years ago you would have believed that a global first-class city would run out of water, or that a US president...
Ramaphosa’s land reform problem
The general feeling of relief that South Africa’s business community may have felt when it was announced that Cyril Ramaphosa had won the ANC leadership race was short-lived for those...
The one thing that can destroy SA
At the end of last year, two reports were published that exposed findings so disturbing that if this knowledge does not spur South Africans into action to save the country’s...
Farming: A labour of love
At Farmer’s Weekly we focus mostly on the ‘how’ of farming and provide a steady stream of practical information that can help farmers improve the efficiency, sustainability and profitability of...
Agriculture needs a confidence boost
The past two years have been tough for the local agricultural sector, and the strain that farmers and agribusinesses have been under is really starting to show.
FARMTALK: we want to get to know you better
Farmer’s Weekly has been proudly serving the Southern African agricultural sector for the past 106 years, and one of the reasons why we have managed to keep going for over...
Politics and farming are intertwined
As the political situation in Zimbabwe started heating up in mid-November, Farmer’s Weekly published a news story on its website about how the departure of President Robert Mugabe may affect...
Drought: a disaster for farmworkers
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the impact of widespread drought conditions across South Africa over the past three years has now become a humanitarian disaster.
Farm crime: an unbearable burden
It must be at least six years ago now that I first became aware of the real scope of one of the many harassments that farmers face.
#BlackMonday brought out the best and worst in us
As I write this, only one day has passed since thousands of South Africans took part in peaceful protests to say that they had had enough of crime, enough of...
DAFF going from bad to rotten
One plus one normally adds up to two. Unless you look at the performance of our departments of agriculture and land affairs.
Farming’s darkest challenge
When we speak about the challenges of farming, we almost invariably talk about economic difficulties such as the cost-price squeeze and attaining economies of scale.
