Opinion

It was the Greek philosopher, Plato, who first said “necessity is the mother of invention”, but Albert Einstein later famously changed the phrase slightly to “necessity is the mother of all invention”.

Preferential access to the EU should be fully exploited by Botswana’s beef producers and feedlots. More cattle need to be exported, with local demand being met by imports from South Africa, say Absa’s Wessel Lemmer and the BMC’s Dr AK Tombale.

South Africa’s economy has stagnated, and by the time you read this, Standard and Poor’s may well have downgraded the country’s credit rating to...

Sending or sharing files over the Internet or cellphone networks can be a tedious affair, especially with a poor rural network connection.

The SA fruit and nut markets are driven by global supply and demand. Ezra Steenkamp, deputy director of trade research at the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), and an associate researcher at the department of agricultural economics at the University of Pretoria, discusses research findings on trade opportunities for the SA fruit and nut industries.

More and more evidence suggests that the actual demand for agricultural land in South Africa is not only being vastly inflated by those in power, but that government presently owns enough land to meet current demand.

I recently took my DJI Phantom 3 Pro drone to a farmer’s day in Komga to demonstrate its capabilities.

Multinational agricultural companies have the capacity and expertise to provide African countries with the inputs needed to grow farming operations – even in challenging climatic conditions, according to DuPont Pioneer president Paul E Schickler.

The planet’s human population is growing at an alarmingly rapid pace, and nobody knows this better than farmers.

As I’ve noted before, drones are growing in popularity amongst farmers.

Willem de Chavonnes Vrugt, a commercial farmer from Setlagole in North West, argues that agricultural transformation is essential for the sustainability of the sector. He stresses, however, that government’s current land reform and transformation policies have no hope of succeeding.

I was shocked, but not altogether surprised, to learn recently that farmers’ incomes worldwide have remained significantly lower than the average income in most sectors, often by as much as 50%.