Rural insight

Much agricultural potential lies locked into the livestock and homestead gardens of the Eastern Cape’s former homelands – potential the Mngcunube Development is seeking to unlock via mentorship. Mike Burgess reports.

Without financial help, 30% of the Lower Orange river area in Northern Cape's flood-hit farmers may not be able to continue operating.

The spectacular and highly erodible sandstone caves of the Barkly East and Rhodes districts in the north Eastern Cape have been used by the district's inhabitants, from the ancient San to today's commercial farmers, for hundreds of years. Mike Burgess visited these historic holkranse.

Tired of being terrorised by gangs and having to lock themselves in their homes before sunset, the residents of the small Eastern Cape town of Indwe came up with a home-grown solution to crime that works.
Issue date: 17 December 2010

After a number of dry years and with part of the region declared a drought disaster area in mid-2009, 2010 was always going to be tough for the members of the Upper Cathcart Farmers Association (UCFA) in the Eastern Cape. And as Mike Burgess discovered, farmers there have been reminded just how isolated they are from efficient state support in times of drought – and that it’s better to rely on the generosity of fellow farmers.

An often overlooked threat to food security in South Africa is the fact that many farmers are nearing retirement age, while fewer youngsters enter the sector. This trend isn’t only prevalent among commercial and small farmers. Peter Mashala visited the Itumeleng Food Project near Pretoria, a once successful initiative, now struggling to stay afloat as its members become too old to work the land.

Since an Australian company applied for gas exploration rights in the southern Karoo, the local community has taken a stand to protect the environment against international fortune seekers. Heather Dugmore investigates.

Coerced by apartheid legislation in the late 1970s, white commercial farmers left the highly productive Ongeluksnek region near Matatiele in the Eastern Cape to make way for a larger Transkei - a forced removal that heralded the collapse of commercial agriculture in the area.

John Sweet Distin built the first livestock fence in South Africa back in the 1800s, making him one of farming’s first livestock management pioneers. But it was his spendthrift sons who would eventually prove his undoing. Heather Dugmore recently visited Distin’s Tafelburg Hall farm near Middelburg.

Having grown up as a farm boy on the Transkei border and being fluent in isiXhosa, Farmer's Weekly correspondent Orrock Robertsen took some survey work in a deep rural district of the Eastern Cape as an opportunity to judge for himself the current state of agriculture there. This is his personal account.

In the late 1970s, Ongeluksnek Valley near Matatiele in the Eastern Cape slipped into productive obscurity, after its commercial farmers faced compensated removal by the nationalist government to increase the size of the former Transkei. Mike Burgess visited Ongeluksnek recently, to see how former resident Vivian Haviside and emerging farmers have joined forces to restore the area to its former productive glory, despite serious challenges.

The Eastern Free State, where Maphale is determined to become a successful commercial farmer despite constant theft from Lesotho.