Almost every December holiday, I drive from Gauteng to the Eastern Cape, not only to enjoy the majestic views on the way but also to use the opportunity to do a mini crop tour.
In a normal rainfall season the vegetation would be green all the way, particularly with recently-emerged maize and soybean fields in the Free State and Gauteng sitting between livestock pastures.
I left Pretoria on a Saturday morning with an inkling that this time around the journey would not be as amazing as the previous years as many areas have not received sufficient rainfall, that would have subsequently led to delays in planting activity.
My suspicion was confirmed just as we left Johannesburg on the stretch to Kroonstad.
This area consisted mainly of brown-coloured fields of prepared soil. That was the case all the way on my drive to the Free State.
There were a few patches of green, but those were mainly fields under irrigation.
Conditions were somewhat worse in the southern Free State into the Eastern Cape, with the only visible green patches being along the main rivers – with irrigation.
All of this dovetailed with the information we have been receiving from farmers, specifically in the Free State and North West, as well as weather reports of the drought in these areas.
In my conversation with Corne Low of Grain SA, it became clear that the North West is in a worse position than what I saw in the Free State, with the dryness leading to low-planting activity in the area.
Given that it is already late in the year for additional maize planting, it is good to look at the possibilities of sunflower seed planting as they can still be sown until January 2019.
It is becoming clear that the optimistic views on an increased planting area that farmers expressed earlier in the year will not materialise.
Remember, in October, South African farmers intended to increase the area planting for summer grain and oilseed by 5% from the 2017-2018 season to 4.03 million hectares. Most summer crops were expected to show an uptick, with the exception of sunflower seed and groundnuts. This was partly driven by favourable agricultural commodity prices.
At the moment, South African Futures Exchange yellow and white maize prices are up by 40% to 60% from levels seen in December 2017, largely due to the aforementioned weather challenges.
The question in many people’s minds is how much area will actually be planted for major grains and oilseeds, and what impact all of this will have on SA’s food inflation and agricultural economic growth.
It is clear that the optimistic estimate that we, at the Agricultural Business Chamber of SA, expressed of 12.2million tons for maize might not materialise due to large areas not having been planted, and weather conditions remaining dry.
Moreover, our colleagues at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy have recently lowered their estimate for SA’s maize harvest to 10.4million tons. From a government perspective, the crop estimates committee will release its view on the area planted at the end of January, and that will give us a sense of the potential size of the crop for the 2018-2019 production season. What we know at the moment is that things are not looking good.
But, let me end on an optimistic note by highlighting that SA will have roughly 3.3million tons of maize stocks at the end of the marketing year in April 2019. So, the 2018-2019 production crop will build onto something when we start the 2019-2020 marketing year in May 2019.
This made the drive to the Eastern Cape unpleasant, but most importantly, educational, as we learnt about the conditions on the ground. I hope that when I drive back there will be some green shoots in the fields, even if it is sunflower seed and improvement in pastures...